Glory Ho

There they were. A barn full of Ugandan twelve year olds in thin white shirts and bright purple bottoms, staring at me, the teacher, the white, the female extra terrestrial at the blackboard. Sunlight slipped through the rafters playing hopscotch on sixty five furry heads.

We had come to Lake Nkuruba spontaneously at the suggestion of a fellow mzungu at the Internet café in Fort Portal. I don’t even know his name. It’s amazing how comfortable I’d become in a thatch-roof hut that smelled like hay. With the pit latrine at the bottom of the hill and a bucket shower with four walls of bamboo. But I guess the bright blue, wooden barn windows made me feel a little like Gretel. There was something blurry and soft about the air an hour before daybreak when I always had to pee. Marijuana grew just down the hill at the foot of the trail, a dark and dense forest where trees were covered in a medussa-like bramble and vines created a monkey wonderland. There were ants as big as your fingernail. Birds most often seen in a book. When black and white colobus monkeys are using your house as a jungle gym, how can you complain?

That morning Felix the chef had fixed us our usual thermos of African tea with elephant cress and ginger, and a Spanish omelet with Top Up “ketchup,” a flourescent pink gel which vageuly tasted like tomatoes. Then we’d helped Emmanuel, an orphan who lived up the hill, to fill jerry cans from the lake. He’d heave them up onto his head for the vertical climb back while we struggled to grip their handles, our opposite arm doing that strange dance.

Camp life was always quiet until around 10:30, when the nursery school orphans ran from their dirt-floor, master-bathroom size schoolroom to the terraced hill where we read. With them they drug two drums and carried a ball made of tape. For awhile, they’d hold our hands and gaze at our faces and pet my hair. But soon the show would begin. Little bodies thrusting their hips in a tribal tradition . Evelyn played the drums. Her twin Carolyn hummed along. Gertrude was the songleader. Adolph swapped boys and girls in their gingham smocks and fourth-hand dresses in and out of the circle.

They’d sing:

Jesus lahves the leetel children.
Jesus lahves the leetel children.
Jesus lahves the leetel children.
I’m gonna make it shine.
Ha ha ha! Halelujah
Ho ho ho! Ho Hozannah
He he he! He’s mah savior
‘m gonna make it shine.

Sometimes I took sick 16-month old, Innocent, dabbing at her nose and letting her sleep against my chest while her mother, the teacher, tried to control the 40 kids who addressed her as Madam. Other times we’d ride the half hour to dusty Fort Portal with Pastor Bosco, a five street cluster of mama’s kitchens and markets where the electricity was almost always out. We checked email and purchased gas, which fueled the generator for our nightly computer classes. He’d buy vegetables and supplies for the camp.

After lunch of carrot and ginger soup, we would walk the twenty five minutes to the school–two cement buildings with corrugated tin rooftops and barred, glass-less windows. Painted here and there were telegraphic messages:

“Avoid sexual touches.”
“Always say no to sexual favors.”
“Don’t be idle.”
“It is best to be a virgin.”
“Finish school.”
“Secondary students look attractive. Abstain from sex and you will too.”

Inside the rooms were old blackboards and clusters of brown benches and surfaces far shabbier than anything in Walnut Grove. Cubby holes had been dug out of the brick. Bits of chalk littered the floor. The kids carried pencils and slim handmade notebooks with newspaper covers. There were no textbooks, no maps and no bulletin boards.

I’d been feeling that “kkkkkk” electrical current during our nightly computer classes at the camp. With two laptops, one picnic table, a reverberating generator and six to ten orphans, Boudreaux and I had spent hours teaching them to open files, close folders and save documents. It was a little like teaching someone to breathe. Simple, not easy. But the kids were thrilled. Fascinated by this strange gadget, impressed that they’d learned how to operate it and appreciative of our time. Those classes had been my most rewarding task in nearly three years abroad.

Teaching English turned out to be harder.

We’d been given very little guidance–a few lesson books, some chalk and a lot of encouraging smiles. It was of absolutely no consequence that we had no teaching degree and no teaching experience. We were native speakers and generally agreeable. That was all that mattered. It was as though we’d signed a contract. They expected us to stay for the semester. To meet the parents. To coordinate PTA.

And here I was.

“Just connect,” Boudreaux had told me fifteen minutes earlier, when I found out we’d be separated, each teaching our own class of 65. “You know how to do that.”

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.