An Interesting Day

 Wednesday, May 25, was not quite the usual Wednesday, which made it a very interesting day overall.

The day began as usual, but the doorbell rang a bit before 6:30 a.m. I wasn't quite dressed, so hollered, "J'arrive!" as I grabbed my t-shirt to put on and my purse with the front door keys. I thought that it was probably the guy from the Internet service or one of his employees. I recently found out that the 5 to 10 young men sitting in front of my house were, indeed, using my WiFi. I'm not sure how they got the password, but I have been calling the service office to get help to change it. Unfortunately, it was not Sharif or one of his employees, but a woman who looked quite surprised to see me. She said she was looking for a lady. I asked, "What lady?" and she replied one who sold oil. I told her that I didn't know, so she left.

Ten minutes after she left, the doorbell rang again. It was a man who had driven up on a motorcycle. He said he was looking for his sister. I asked if she had been here a few minutes ago and, receiving an affirmative response, sent him off in her direction.

Later, while I was at breakfast, it occurred to me that perhaps the woman was looking for Dela. She sells all sorts of things, and I thought I remembered oil being one of them. I asked Dela if she thought the woman was looking for her, but she denied it. She doesn’t sell oil, just oil drums. So it is a mystery. Truth be told, I wondered at the time, if it were some sort of scam or effort to get into my house. My recent WiFi discovery has rendered me suspicious of everyone!

At school I found a very small class . . . and no teacher! Since I arrived before 8:00, when the day officially begins, I was not surprised that Tata was not in the classroom. But time kept moving and she still didn’t come. The children began to get restless, but they eventually amused themselves by taking turns counting the bâtonnets—the little sticks used in math class. When they completed that activity, I pointed to the letters and numbers on the board that they know and asked individuals to identify them.

After an hour of them being seated, I decided to let them move a bit, so we left the classroom to review the observations of modes of transport that they had been doing in the past two or three weeks. We walked over to my car. Actually, we “flew,” at the suggestion of Eliakim, sticking out our arms and pretending to be airplanes. They had remembered the car vocabulary fairly well. Once we had gone through all the words, we “flew” to a motorcycle and reviewed that vocabulary. Final stop in our voyage: a bicycle so that we could go over those words. Then we returned home--the classroom.

During our flights around the school yard, I caught a glimpse of Tata in one of the elementary school classrooms and then understood her absence. The lower grades (1-5, I think; maybe just 1-4) are taking exams this week and she was helping with that. Solving the mystery did little to reduce my anxiety, though. Time for snack was approaching, but I didn’t think the children had paid for it yet. I asked them and collected money from two of the twelve who had come that day. Two more of them said that their older siblings had their money. Usually there are at least ten students who buy their morning snack at school. When the young man came to find out how many meals to bring, I did not know what to answer. Fortunately, I saw the teacher walking toward the room, so I asked him to wait until she got there. She straightened everything out and gave him an accurate count.

After snack is normally play time, and on Wednesdays I usually leave to go to the middle school for French class. Tata told me to go; she said she would send some older girls to watch the kids for the rest of the morning.

The next interesting part of the day occurred when I stopped by the house to see if anybody needed a ride to prayer meeting. It starts at 5:00, but the family likes to go early, so I leave my house at 4:30. As I got out of my car to go into Hammer’s compound, I encountered some of our elementary school girls on their way home from their last exam. We stopped and talked a bit. They told me that the exams had gone well and that they had done good work. It was a good moment: one of those in which I feel a part of the community here.

Only Sena was still at home to need a ride, but we passed one of the girls from church as she was walking, so stopped to pick her up as well. When we got to the compound, we found Ruth (another church and school girl) standing by the mango tree throwing things at it. She confessed that she had been trying to bring down some mangos by throwing her shoes at them, and now one of her shoes was stuck in the tree. She and Sena used a long bamboo pole to try to dislodge the shoe. I even helped, thinking that my height would bring the pole closer to the shoe. Finally, Sena just climbed the tree and shook the branches where the shoe was. Eventually it fell down.

Shortly afterward Tabitha arrived. She heard the story of the shoe, I think, and, when Yaovi and Meda arrived, called their attention to the mangos that Ruth had been trying to harvest. Yaovi got the pole and dislodged a few of them. They were quickly picked up by Ruth, Ema, and Meda. The pictures in this post are of that mango gathering. You can only see the pole—it’s to the left of the photo—and not Yaovi. But you can see the others watching and waiting to catch the falling mangos.

I thought it was a perfect ending to a most interesting day.