My post of two days ago consisted of what I do best: Carping and Whining; Whining and Carping. My object of my excessive complaining this time was the uncoordinated, ineffective and relatively trivial efforts of the many foreign organizations that are here, dipping a toe in flood of poverty and scarce resources that is drowning this country. Of course, since it was me, I made it sound like the Keystone Cops meet the Three Blind Mice. Because I'm like Chicken Little--always ready to spot a cloud inside a silver lining.
You know this, of course. You read my posts with the same outlook as when talking to your paranoid schizophrenic relative at Thanksgiving--to see how loony my theories will be this time. As well you should. If things were really as bad as I make them sound, they we'd all need to be medicated.
So you can imagine my shock this morning at the Juvenile Jail when the man in charge came into the classroom with a middle-aged white man. This fellow, who I will choose to call Peter, introduced himself to me and explained that he organized volunteer trips for students from Ireland and that he had a large number of volunteers arriving this weekend, and eleven of his volunteers would be working in the Juvenile Jail starting next Monday. Well, there are currently 17 children and teenagers in the Juvenile Jail, and the organization I am with is providing 3 or 4 volunteers every day. The man I have chosen to call Peter indicated that 4 of his volunteers would be there each morning and 7 each afternoon. We are normally there from 9:00am until 1:30pm, so that should work out okay, to the extent that having two shifts of 7 or 8 volunteers each day won't be overkill for working with the 17 children. It at least is better than having all 15 volunteers there at once.
I must the fellow I met was very nice and I'd expect the same of his Irish students. I will do my best not to reveal my real personality to them. It's just such a huge example of wasted volunteer resources and lack of coordination between organizations. Just as I was talking about. God, I really, really, really hate it when my lunatic ramblings turn out to be right.
On the positive side, my plan to have the children in the Juvenile Jail love me so that I can turn them into an army of little cut-purses who will make me rich is proceeding even ahead of schedule. As I mentioned earlier, I memorized their names over the weekend, and on Monday I was able to match names and faces, so that I have been able to refer to them by name all week. Of course they are delighted. And yesterday my interpreter had to go to another work assignment with other volunteers, so I was teaching on my own in Swahili. I stumbled from time to time, but I got everything explained in the end--and it was a lesson on working with decimals and fractions, so I would have stumbled trying to explain it in English, too.
So this morning when the interpreter and I started the class, the students told the interpreter (a young Tanzanian woman), "Don't say anything! He doesn't need you!"--as a joke; she is very popular with the kids; but they got a kick out of being able to say the "we" (the students and I) did fine without her. At lunchtime, the kids had rice and (a few) beans, which I have noticed is a bestseller there. One student invited me to have some of his lunch. He's one that I have an especially strong relationship with because I have been working with him on some math concepts he will need to catch up in school when he is released from the jail. So I took a couple of bites, and proclaimed how much I enjoyed the food. So a second student gave me his spoon and plate of rice and beans, and I took another couple of bites. Then many more students called out to me to share their food, and I told them "Nimeshiba sana!", which is the Swahili expression meaning "I am full of food" that I had misused previously. (Proving the point that I tell my students, "Don't be afraid of making mistakes.") They all thought that was hilarious! If only I were so clever in English. :-(
So, all in all, I'd have to say it would be a lot easier for things to be worse than for things to be better.
D'oh! Please, please, please, don't let me be right again.
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