Memory

The children were tested this week. From Wednesday to Friday, we "invigilated" our own exams and other teachers' as the students spent an hour or two forging 20% of their term grade. Another 20% comes in the next set of exams and then the final 60% for the final exam. High pressure and heated competition forge students whose choice between welding apprenticeship or medical school might be shaped by a single day's work in a classroom. These students know they compete for few national university spots, so any time they spend doing anything but study they feel they have wasted. Or so a recent University graduate said to me yesterday. There is certainly little opportunity for the boarders to do anything else. After supper, they go back to class to study on their own until bed. Saturday, we have elitist class--extra fees, extra attention. It's not all bad. This most recent Saturday we measured the height of the flag pole with clinometers we had fashioned from our protractors.
As I try to get an angle on the extremely hard-working students, I continue to have English barriers. Besides obvious things like speaking loudly and slowly in front of a group, individual communication is not usually smooth. Forget puns, especially if they're thrown in haphazardly, and move more toward big gestures with silly voices or innuendo. A pun takes too much explanation, and only interesting double meanings justify explanation. A student the other day, a couple hours after I took a picture of her at her request, said to me, "You will remove those for us later?" She gave me no preface but a glance at the camera--"picha" or "snap" in the sentence would have clued me in. Ms. Wacera was nearby, and I was grateful she knew what the student meant. I couldn't even tease afterward with the difference between delete and develop, because the student had only just learned the word "develop." But I tried [to lose the game].
Here I am, taking pictures in a new place far from home--far enough to actually learn something from the Christmas letter I received for the first time--and things pass on. There is a melancholy guilt, a wistful Sehnsucht, attached with leaving. Even if you only leave your own culture because you don't fit and want to blame not fitting on culture shock, you miss things. I love my home, my people, our ways (well, mostly). And glimpses of "how we do things back home" tend to float unbidden through my mind when emptied.
The year is half over--half full, I guess, of opportunity for growth. The relationship building now has a possibility, a responsibility to grow deeper than simply exchanging cultural notes, but I am not yet Kenyan. It is still comfortable and easy to get stuck on talk of home. I have to remember how to move past this--when in a new place, the things and people that mattered before just do not compute here. But some things always matter. The language describing these things changes, as do the customary smokescreens, but everyone loves talking about things they love with people they love. I think it is better to want to know what someone thinks because of their personhood, not their nationality.
Josh put a sad CD on before he left. These ramblings are totally his fault. The Fray. Blame them, too. And probably Canada, but I don't remember why.
I remember you, people back home. And I miss talking to you, and being a part of your lives. But not enough to leave now. Jesus makes life here, too--abundandantly as he tends to, and I am a part of other lives I am not yet ready to leave behind.