In TanzaniaChina. With Coffee.: In Which I get up and Go

This week I said goodbye to my students. My new class that I haven't been teaching very long wasn't very bothered by the news. I like them, they seem to like me, but I've only been teaching them for about half this term, and I keep being absent what with mandatory Peace Corps conferences, an important Peace Corps meeting, and a week spent in Mbeya deciding I wanted to move. My other class seemed more startled and saddened at the news, which surprised me.

I don't normally enjoy this class. There are a group of students who blatantly don't pay attention and then complain that they don't understand. They have complained that I spend all my time teaching them the practical use of the computer and don't teach them theoretically. They have also recently started complaining that I take them to the lab when possible twice a week rather than their allotted once a week and this is, and I quote, "too much movement." I am not sorry. Fortunately for my motivation, there are three or four girls who try hard and are interested and I have given up on the rest of the class and just started to teaching to them. They actually made my last time teaching in Morogoro really great. We were starting the programming unit, which I really enjoy, so just as an introduction and because I know whoever replaces me won't do this, I went over some basic features of a programming language, operators, looping structures, and functions, demonstrating each with my python shell. Then I reminded them of all the functions they had used doing spreadsheets, and wrote a summation function in Python and told them that behind the graphic interface they always use, this is the sort of thing that's really happening when they write =SUM(). One of my bright girls was sitting on the edge of her chair and her eyes just completely lit up as she made the connection, and she was smiling all over her face when I told her (well, the whole class really, but at that point I was giving the lesson to her) that this is it. This is what is happening, your computer is not a magical machine. At some point someone sat down and wrote everything you use. She looked as though she got it completely and was really excited about it. When my normal slacker boy complained that he completely didn't understand anything of that day's lesson she turned around and told him she would explain later.

And lo, the geek shall inherit the earth, and despite stereotype, the geek woman shall stand beside the geek man and we shall create the world that those who make fun of us will use without bothering to understand it, and we shall feel impossibly superior.

After class was over, all my bright girls gave me hugs and wanted email and phone numbers. One also told me I should remember to pray because that is our only weapon in the world. Had I been mentally quicker, I might have been able to respond to that with some inspiring speech about the helpless mentality of such a statement and rebut that we ourselves are our weapons in the world, we use our own strength to walk forward and help those with us, and prayer is good, channeling all our energy their will not do anything to make the status more quo. This is, however, not necessarily the sort of conversation I want to get into on my last day, particularly with a woman who grew up in a culture where it is hard to say accurately that there is something real she personally can do to fight the world. Because sexism. Also, post-colonialism. Racist imperial domination is really bad for a society, who knew? So I took the remark in the spirit in which it was meant, and thanked her.

Afterwards, I gathered all the Peace Corps volunteers in the region and we went to the river behind the college and had a bonfire (that I did none of the work for except bring the kerosene, because two of my sitemates have lots of fun building fires) with watermelon, stale chips from the street, the various dips and sauces that my other sitemate who returned to America left behind and I didn't want to pack because space, and homemade hibiscus wine. Which is tasty, incidentally. I also gave them my keys so they could strip my house of whatever I didn't pack once I left. The last I heard they were really excited and said it was like a market only everything was free and totally vultured the place. Socialist existence. It leads to less waste. Also, I am now in a fully furnished apartment with furniture and everything and I am inheriting another volunteer's things, so it's a reciprocal vulturing.