Then, taking advantage of the lighthearted moment, the only girl at the Mahabusu, Anna came over to me and said, in English, "No class. I teach you . . ." and then explained to Elizabeth that she would teach me how to weave a bracelet, so we should not have class. The other students laughed and cheered. I'd like to think that I know when I hold a losing hand--and I'm pretty sure this was one such time. I agreed to be the student today. I must say, Anna was a good teacher. Patient, helpful, willing to minimize her focus on my mistakes. Damn, I hate being around a good example! People might expect me to pick up some of her good habits.
The idea of weaving a bracelet involves getting a number of strands of yarn and then hand-tying each strand with each other strand, row after row, until you have a band of the desired length. Here's a picture of the process being done by someone who knows what he is doing:
This is a much more complicated pattern than I was given to work on, but the idea is the same. I think these kids' experience with teaching Europeans/Americans to do this is that the foreigner works at it for couple of minutes, laughs, and gives it back to the kid. Well, now they've learned something new about us foreigners. Namely, that some of us have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I found the whole business of repetition and pattern creation to be very soothing. Kids kept coming by, looking at my work, and saying, with varying degrees of amazement, "Really good!" And I would thank them and then add (all of this happening in Swahili), "I have a very good teacher." Which Anna got a kick out of, of course. And when I told her that now I was a craftsman with good skill (fundi kwa akili nzuri), she enjoyed that immensely, and announced to the other kids what I had said.
So what does the end result of this process look like? Well, it depends on whether the work is being done by a kid or by a fundi kwa akili nzuri. As you look at the next picture, try to guess whether these were made by my or by a 15-year-old kid:
Have I told you lately how smart you are? Because you are absolutely right. These were made by a 15-year-old kid. (The impertinent kid mentioned at the start of this story, as it turns out.) So what does a bracelet made by someone with three college degrees and 63 years of life experience look like:
Actually, that's an exaggeration. This is what a bracelet made only half by that mature and highly educated individual and half by Anna looks like. However, I can say with absolute certainty that the two mistakes that are visible in this bracelet were mine and mine alone. (I like to think of them as my "artistic signature").
After we finished for the day and left the Mahabusu, Elizabeth told me of a conversation she had had with one of the Irish volunteers (see my post "I Hate It When I'm Right"). By way of back story, I'll mention that these four Irish volunteers showed up on Monday with no translator, not a word of Swahili among them, and no lessons planned. They suggested that they would just observe on Monday and then be ready Tuesday to step in, which was fine with me.
Come Tuesday morning, I asked them what they would like to do, and they said they'd like to teach a lesson on English. Since we normally have two lessons each day, I said fine, you teach a lesson on English and I'll teach math for the second lesson. Then, after they had stood around talking to each other for 10 minutes while the students sat in the classroom waiting for a teacher, they came in and immediately foundered and sank, with no survivors. They just were thinking they could wing it, and discovered the hard way what a bad teaching technique that is. I offered to take over and go with my lesson--I really wasn't trying to embarrass them; that's why at the beginning I asked what they wanted to do--but it did not make me sad for them to discover the difference between playing at being a volunteer and putting in the work that this job deserves.
Anyway, I have the impression that these volunteers think I'm a real taskmaster with a dim view of anything that borders on play or fun. I would describe my persona at the Juvenile Jail differently, but I wouldn't quibble over their characterization.
Which leads back to the conversation Elizabeth told me about. The Irish volunteer asked Elizabeth something to the effect of, "The children really like him [referring to me]," to which she agreed, and he went on, "Why do they like him so much?" She indicated to me that she didn't try to answer that. So the volunteer went on, "They laugh so much with him! I wish I could understand what he is saying." I'm guessing that he was talking about the mood in my classroom, because even as I am working them hard, I am also teasing them and joking about myself. On Tuesday, for the first time, instead of referring to them as "my students" (in Swahili), I referred to them as "my scholars", which is entertaining just to hear a foreigner speak such an odd word as "scholar" as well as being somewhat overblown language in general. The best thing for me about hearing secondhand about Elizabeth's conversation is that, if you had asked me, "Do the children think you are special?", I would have been taken aback by the question. I had never considered it; I just try not to be my normal pain-in-the-ass with these kids. (I'm not kidding here. I just try not to provoke the "oh-shit-here-he-comes-again" reaction.) So getting this indirect feedback from what a stranger sees when watching the children interact with me is very encouraging. I am so perfectly positioned to have the most tremendous fall from grace! And I can do it. Because I am indeed A Craftsman With Good Skill!!!
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