III. Mother Mushpa

What does the title mean? Your guess is as good as mine. We were playing duck, duck, goose in nursery the other day, and the kids spontaneously changed it to duck, duck, mushpa! We figured it was Swahili for goose, or some other Tanzanian thing that we didn't know about, but the nursery teacher, a hired local, was as clueless as we were. Whatever. If they're happy playing duck, duck, mushpa, we'll let them play all day.

Nursery is a bit like going to the zoo for three hours every morning... if you're the zookeeper... and you are meant to educate your animals. Ok, I guess I'm selling the kids a bit short. They are more receptive to education than say, a bengal tiger, though maybe less so than certain primates. Alright, to be fair, they're really great kids, and some of them quite smart, but three hours is a long time for anyone to sit still and scream "A! B! C!" and so on at the top of his lungs. That is how education works here in Tanzania. The barely literate teacher stands before the class and shouts letters at them while pointing with a stick to a dented, leaning chalkboard, and the kids scream the letters back like overly enthusiastic parrots with megaphones, not usually looking at where the teacher is pointing but shouting loudly enough to stay awake and focused.

The funny thing is, it kind of works. The kids do, after several hours of repeating the same letters over and over, sometimes manage to identify and even write their ABCs. It's not the way we do it back home, but T.I.A. Anyone who has been to Africa and has heard the phrase: "This is Africa," knows what I'm talking about. You don't always ask why here, because sometimes there is no why. Why did our taxi driver decide to take a shortcut through the lumbermill yesterday that resulted in a flat tire? Why did we find a child less than two years old wandering the streets of Buswelu in the dark and sobbing until we brought it to its mother at the store around the corner? Why did the power spontaneously disappear despite the perfect weather during Ayesha and my mad packing dash last night? The only available answer is that marvelous catch-all: T.I.A. Just accept it. And that's what we do with nursery.

For example, Glady has Herpes, which are quite possibly contagious, but we just have to accept it. Glady is a five year old albino child who was recently brought to the orphanage because of the danger for albinos in Tanzania. Witch doctors have been known to kill albinos, or to offer high prices for their body parts. I don't know what superstitious belief leads these people to believe that albinos are less than human, but Glady is safe for now at the walled-in orphanage guardad by Marlon and Guy (the maasai whose names, I only recently discovered, are actually Lopido and Lingai). When she stares out at you with her poorly-focused eyes from under the granny hat she wears to protect her pale skin from the powerful sun (and to protect us from her herpes), you wonder how anyone could hurt such a child. A raggedy dress and some oversized flipflops complete the ensemble, along with a charming personality that makes Glady a very huggable child. She is always begging to be lifted up in the air, to be placed on our shoulders, or to sit like a baby on our hips, and we comply most of the time, doing our best to avoid the sores, washing carefully afterward, but trying not to treat her like a second-class citizen.

In fact, we often end up treating her like a little princess instead. She is one of the most engaging and intellectually curious children in nursery, and she's got it in her mind that I'm her personal tutor, so I'm expected to monitor each pencil stroke when she's attempting a new letter, and of course to shower adulation on her for each correct one. Glady gets a special spot in the nursery blog entry, maybe because she consumes a disproportionate amount of my time with her adorable clinginess, but for the others here's the rundown:

Danny: Neighborhood kid, so not actually an orphan. Very quiet and spacey, but quite cooperative and cute. Can't write or say letters, but identifies them on the board with the best of 'em.

Baraka: Son of Joel, director of the orphanage. Very advanced. Bored to tears but well-behaved nonetheless.

Angelo: Also Joel's child. Way to young for nursery. Awfully cute when not oozing from every orifice.

Jonathan: Neighborhood kid. Maybe 3 years old. 1st day screamed for 20 minutes straight, then toodled off home (down the street by himself) with his workbook and pencil. Repeat performance on the second day. Now has settled in to smacking things with his pencil until the point breaks and then asking for a new one.

Lina: Sharp as a tack. Young and tiny but ahead of the class and just generally in charge. Lina runs her own show. She is the lead singer in the extemporaneous 6 year old girls' imaginary karaoke band that forms near the jungle gym on occasion.

Roda: Nearly inanimate. Quite chunky. Looks like Sarah the Triceratops from "The Land Before Time."

Ceci: Adorable. Huge smile, likes to be chased around the playground doubled over in fits of uproarious laughter wearing a raggedy, puffed-sleeve dress that transforms her into a little ebony Scarlet O'Hara. Pulls on the heartstrings with imploring, pitiable requests of "me pencil, me paper," and "me baby," so laden with drama she could extract tears from a block of granite.

Lulu: Lina's older sister. Though not quite as bright, she is well on her way to mastering all 26 letters of the alphabet. Drama is in her blood as well, though she is easily pacified by an invitation to sit on my lap and have me use her back as a percussion instrument while she repeats "funny bunny, how are you I'm fine" over and over, tickled at the choppy sound of her own voice.

And finally, Editha: The nursery teacher. 26 years old with a child and no husband. She works hard in nursery, then goes to computer school. I think she has a lovely heart, but the language barrier, or perhaps cultural barrier has created some funny situations. Aside from her frequent requests to come to our house (which we have to awkwardly decline) she recently told each of us that she loved us, and was going to buy us something for Valentine's day. Since I was alone when she told me this, I took special care to mention Ayesha several times in my response. She has had some education in English, but it was either a quite minimal, or a long time ago. She now pronounces V as "veeeyoooo" and R as "ara," and she insists on writing the entire alphabet in lower case letters, except the P and the Q, which she capitalizes. The other day I caught her labeling Glady's workbook like so: GRANIS. I'm very glad that she's there, but I'm also glad that there are volunteers to undo some of her quirky little mistakes.

Nursery constitutes a large chunk of our responsibility at the orphanage, and is not merely academic. We also play a variety of outdoor games with the kids, which invariably end in chaos and laughter. I really do love nursery, even though it nearly kills me, and it has been a great way to connect with the young ones. If you happen to know any games that are easy to explain in Swahili, feel free to send them my way.