In a Perfect World...

Dear Lydia,

Oh friend, the number of times I have started writing to you in the past week or so and been cut short by one of a million things are too many to count! Bryan is with David at the airstrip as we speak. They are probably having tea in a little shop by the side of the strip as they wait for his plane to land. As is usually the case, I was caught off guard by the goodbyes. Even having known for the whole two weeks he was here when exactly he was leaving, the flurry of packing up and going to the airstrip, prayers and one hug for him and lots more for you and the kids felt rushed.

His visit here has been so good and we have been so grateful for all his help with the translation team. Thank you for being so cheerfully willing to play single parent for over two weeks while he travelled the globe to come pitch in on this side again for a while! That is no small thing. Bryan and I have felt so encouraged about where things stand this week workwise. It turns out that despite everything - all the wars and evacuations, obstacles, challenges and setbacks, it is happening. Somehow – creatively and imperfectly, but steadily – it is happening. Thank you for the part you have and are playing in that.   

I have wished for you these past few weeks as I have been doing this literacy teacher training course. In a perfect world you would have been there with me, lending your experience from Tanzania and thoughtful, thorough personality, to my experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, creative messiness. We would have made quite the team! We will still, I think. Until then though, it has been good for me to gain a little experience in all of this on my own too. Because, we don’t live in a perfect world do we? And you have to start somewhere.

This particular thing has started under a tree in our front yard. Every morning one of the earliest participants sweeps the sprinkling of yellow neem leaves that have fallen in the night from the shady expanse of smooth dirt that is our classroom. When class starts and we are busy parsing syllables on the rippled blackboard hanging  by a piece of red string and a nail from the broad scarred trunk of the baobab, the guard’s hoard of scatter-brained chickens bob around our feet and women fill jerry cans loudly from the masura nearby.  Our chalk pieces and duster get stored between drills in the battered wheelbarrow propped against a bumpy root.

The trickiest thing about this training to me has been trying to find the perfect balance between focusing on training teachers (here is the methodology behind the primer, switch up drills to keep your class engaged, talk through what you are doing as you do it blah, blah, blah) and focusing on actually teaching this group to read (ḍ is for ḍulak, let’s pair it with the vowels we’ve learned - ḍä, ḍa, ḍu,ḍi, ḍï, ḍo, de, ḍü; nope, other way, remember we actually read left to right in your language, and so on). It is a teacher training course.

But until three weeks ago they had never seen their language written down.

So, understandably, it’s been a bit tricky.

Thankfully, about half the group was already quite literate in English because they are attending local secondary schools (they can’t speak a word of English but they are familiar with the Roman orthography) and they have picked this up fast. Yassir volunteers for everything, grinning like a kid while he reads with gusto through the story of the giraffe and bull fighting over the milk. They have been practicing actually teaching lessons this week, and he is a natural, confidently walking us through the drills and the story, feeling free to tweak what it is the primer to better fit whatever the reality of the class at the moment.

Then I have a several that I am pleased will just be finishing up knowing how to pick their way through a sentence. Mostly that’s Zahia. She’s older than the other two women in the class. She dresses nicely and has a Nokia phone. But mercy, she can’t read worth a flip. Which isn’t really what bothers me as much as her refusal to try. She can memorize a six sentence story having heard it just once so at first I thought she was a fantastic reader, that is, until I saw that her finger was off by about three words the entire time she “read” a story. Whenever she is asked to come do something at the blackboard she takes her sweet time flipping her sky blue tobe over her shoulder and dragging her flipflops loudly as she makes her way to the front. And instead of trying to actually sound anything out she guesses – brilliantly - but almost always a guess. And if she is wrong she throws her head back and laughs a gorgeous, carefree maddening laugh before handing the chalk to someone else.

The gender divide is more distinct than I hoped it would be. Even Mariam and Khadija, the other two women in the training, are soft-spoken and easily overrun by others. It almost makes me appreciate Zahia’s fearless sass. But Mariam and Khadija try, and though they are quiet, I see them sounding out words to themselves as their fingers move across a page and my heart swells. They may not be standing in front of a class of 30 other people anytime soon, but I bet they will teach their kids to read their language. And that is enough for me.  

We are all learners together. Some of us are learning how to sound out a few letters while others are learning how to explain the reading process to others. I am learning all sorts of new Arabic vocab as I stretch the limits of my language, shuffling through my Arabic dictionary as I try to remember the words for vowel or confidence. Similarly they are expanding their language as they practice teaching in their mother tongue and come up with words that haven’t really existed before. Words like syllable, comma, page. I love what I hear. A story is something like “Fox thing” because traditional stories are often about (told by?) foxes. A book is something like “spider web” because when books were first introduced to their community in years past people thought the white paper looked like spider webs. All the boxes for drills in the primer have been dubbed “houses” so we practice syllable drills in “the big house”. It’s absolutely fantastic.

But I think the best thing that maybe any of us have learned in the past three weeks is that it turns out I actually love teaching literacy. I love it. That should be obvious enough. But after years of spending the bulk of my time focusing on learning language(s), building a house(s), growing and feeding a baby(ies) etc. etc. and then facing the terrifying inertia of actually getting started, it is an immense relief to me to realize I did not in fact miss my calling. I was made for this. I may be making a mess of it all now as I wade through the necessary mistakes and learning curve of all the things I now know not to do next time, but I like it. It feels important. And I think someday, I will be good at it too.  

The other day Aisha and I had a conversation while I was kneading bread and she was washing the dishes. I know she would love to be sitting in on this class, and would quite frankly, be one of the best learners in the group, but as a single mom with a job it just didn’t work for her to be in on it this time. But I feel bad sometimes when I see her sweeping the porch out of the corner of my eye, straining to listen in as we read as a group. As we worked in the kitchen together yesterday and talked about the literacy class she said something that meant the world to me and that will sustain me on the days I feel like I’ve completely blown it. She said, “Thank you for this work you are doing. It is giving us patience.” It was that sabur word again, the one that has meant so much to me in my years here that I am naming my daughter after it. Patience. Endurance. Sabur. This work is giving sabur. To think that anything I am doing is bringing about that, fumbling and bumbling under a baobab tree with a warped chalk board in this imperfect world, well, that’s enough for me.

You are a part of that gift of sabur too. And I hope you receive it back as I do, in your own ways and time. May God continue to give us all sabur.

Other than all that literacy chatter I have no big news. Life here has been so delightfully quiet lately that the UN cancelled their weekly security meeting last week. I haven’t heard a single gunshot in the night this week and no one has cut through the fence line looking for something to snatch in weeks. But it is still never boring. There is an endless supply of random happenings spattered throughout the week that keep me just the right amount on our toes.

A couple days ago an adolescent chicken plum fell right out of the sky a few feet from where Bethany and I sat entertaining guests. A hawk had snatched it from the yard then lost its grip when it tried to settle in a tree overhead. One of the ladies plucked it up, tossed it on the hot charcoal heating water for coffee and proceeded to casually turn it every few minutes, occasionally removing tufts of charred feathers or innards as the skinny bird cooked. Eventually she pulled it off the fire barehanded and tore it into bits and handed it out kindly to the kids who clamoured for some roasted meat, my daughters the greediest among them. They noisily ate the unexpected manna from heaven that had been bobbing around our yard literally minutes before   

Another day a Land Cruiser full of Rwandan UN Peace Keepers pulled into the compound, all heavily armed and weighted down with blue helmets and flak jackets. They were a brand new battalion, and having heard of a number of robberies at NGO compounds, elected to familiarize themselves with the area. When they had called ahead of time to say they were “sending someone” to get the GPS coordinates of our home we were imagining an individual turning up. Instead the truck roared in right up between the two houses and a dozen soldiers (who could speak neither Arabic nor English) leapt out and fanned out across the yard, from the latrine to the guard hut to the tire swing, standing at attention and hardly averting their eyes from who knows what in the distance even when Bethany offered them glasses of water. It was bizarre. Thanks again UN. I feel so much safer now that there are twelve AK-47s and several grenades within feet of my children. But they didn’t stay long and I shouldn’t complain. Like I said, we haven’t had a petty break in in a while.

I will let you go. We are praying for your sweet reunions with David very soon! He is coming with lots of love and hugs from all of us here. Hope you are gearing up for a very merry Christmas.

Much love,

Libby (or Lïbï)