Assortment of News

It feels like it’s been a really long time since either of us has written a blog entry, so I’m doing this mainly from a feeling of it being overdue, even though I’m not sure at the moment what I’ll be writing about.

I guess if I rewind somewhat I can think of a few things worth mentioning. I believe Kathryn talked about the drama at her school between her principal and one of the other teachers, revolving around the school field trip to Swakopmund and Mr. Hasheela’s outrageous behaviour on the school bus, already. What I’m not so sure has been talked about is the next dramatic episode to have occurred, unrelated to that one.

Kathryn and I have struggled with this throughout the entire year: we, being the only truly native English speakers around, are often appalled (a harsh word, but accurate) at what seems to us a lack of correct English in official English exams. I could go on an entire tirade about this, but to keep things brief I’ll just say that it’s all too frequent that a question or many questions on an exam will be virtually impossible to answer correctly, either because (a) the instructions are not clear, (b) the premise on which the question is based is unclear or false, (c) the question refers to information which is unclear, false, or missing entirely, (d) the wording of the question itself is unintelligible, or (e) all of the above. And sadly, I am not exaggerating.

Well, to be fair, the amount of this I’ve experienced at my school is somewhat small. At Kathryn’s, on the other hand, since it seems the “cream of the crop” among teachers end up at secondary schools and primary schools are typically left with a shallower pool of talent, these types of problems are commonplace. Hence the dramatic episode I alluded to two paragraphs ago: Last term Kathryn was given the task of “monitoring” an exam, which means going over it with the person who wrote it and making suggestions and revisions. She did this without complaint, but unfortunately the level of English in the exam was so low that she couldn’t figure out a tactful way to express to the author, basically, “This entire thing needs to be redone, preferably by someone else,” without offending him deeply. So instead she made improvements where she could and then requested permission from her school’s Head of Department to prepare her own exam for her learners.

While that all happened, with seemingly nary a problem, this term it all just exploded. For reasons not entirely understood (though an inter-faculty vendetta not involving Kathryn is suspected), Kathryn’s coworker decided to make a huge stink about the whole affair this term. A meeting was called, Kathryn was interrogated by teachers from other schools . . . even the author of last term’s exam was there to express his humiliation and anger. All of this when Kathryn was given the go-ahead by her H.O.D. and no one said anything against her decision at the time.

So, she was a bit shaken up by that. The good news is that there were at least a few level heads involved in the meeting who sympathized with Kathryn and shared her (and my) opinion that the whole thing was being blown way out of proportion. Among them were my H.O.D., who came to me the next day to ask how Kathryn was doing and basically made the comment, “I don’t know what’s wrong with those guys [Kathryn’s coworker who made the stink and the others who interrogated her so forcefully]. I didn’t see the point in what they were doing at all.”

She’s OK now, but that was a trying period. After-school drinking was required on more than one occasion, to help lower the stress level in our home.

What else can I say? Oh, man, so my main focus at school these past couple of weeks has been on the pen pals program I’ve set up with Mrs. Croul, my 12th grade English teacher from high school, between my learners and hers. It’s something I actually tried to start way back in Term 1 — I even went so far as getting my learners to write letters and sent them off in the mail — but it never materialized, because the Namibian postal system is something of a joke (not that I’m biased). This time around, I decided to use e-mail, not sure how well that would work with the majority of my learners being computer illiterate, but hoping for the best.

I’d say it’s proven quite a success thus far; the whole thing with my learners not understanding computers or having their own e-mail address inspired me to set up a little system in the lab to make things as simple as possible for everyone involved (including myself). It gave me a good deal more experience with computer programming — always a plus in my book — but more importantly, my learners are constantly coming in to the lab now to check their “e-mail” (i.e., the thing I set up) and write responses. And the best part: apparently Mrs. Croul’s kids are just as excited as mine. Many of the pairings have already written back and forth 4 or 5 times at this point. I also took class photos and sent them across, and they’re doing the same. Obviously my learners are quite excited to see some faces (especially the boys, some of whom I think have wild notions spinning around in their heads of somehow attaining American girlfriends this way . . . and yes, I already told them to forget about that, but sometimes there’s no reasoning with this bunch).

Now for an abrupt topic shift (when there’s a lot of different subjects to cover, sometimes smooth transitions are best not even pursued): there’s a bit of sad news involving our puppy, Bingo, and one of our regular visitors, Mekondjo. Mekondjo, in case you don’t remember, is that kid we love but have some serious reservations about at the same time: he’s always visiting, and is almost always really enthusiastic and sweet (not to mention that he once declared me his second best friend), but he also once took our money under the pretense of purchasing some odjove oil with it . . . and never did anything. (In Namibia that’s called “eating the money.”) But he ALSO once recovered some stolen markers for us. Well, now there’s another event to throw on the “Bad Mekondjo” pile.

Mekondjo and his sister Meameno were the original owners of Bingo — their dog is his mother — so we often give them a bit more freedom in playing with him than the other kids. Even so, however, Meameno is sometimes too rough with him and we have to explain to her that we don’t want our dog to be treated that way (“Please do not poke our puppy in the eye”; “Please do not slap our puppy in the face”; and so on). I’d say lately she’s been pretty good about it. Mekondjo, on the other hand, apparently hasn’t taken our instructions on how to treat our puppy very seriously. Yesterday, while I was in town for a funeral (more on that in a moment), Kathryn let Bingo outside while she took a shower. Later, she looked out the window and saw Bingo outside our gate playing with Mekondjo and some other boys. Mekondjo was trying to get him to go back inside our gate, but when Bingo wasn’t cooperating Mekondjo wound up and kicked him — hard. Like the way you punt a football.

In case you didn’t know this about Kathryn, she can be pretty fierce when it comes to rectifying what she sees as unacceptable behaviour. So she went outside and informed Mekondjo that since he just kicked our dog (and the way she explains it, it’s pretty unlikely he would have done that if he knew she were watching), he wasn’t welcome back to our house that day. Later she sent the message with Meameno that if Mekondjo wants to come back, he’ll have to apologize to Bingo.

Mekondjo’s response to all this (as we’ve heard through the grapevine) is to tell the other kids that he’s going to come to our house to take back “his dog.” This is, to put it mildly, annoying. It actually makes me think of a drunken, abusive father storming up to his ex-wife’s house and banging on the door demanding to see his kid or something like that. Although I guess if you analyse that analogy, I’ve just painted Mekondjo as a much more violent and ill-tempered person than he is, and also us as his ex-wife. Anyway, my point is just that I really don’t see his claim to Bingo, especially if he’s going to mistreat him like that. And obviously, we will tell him as much.

OK, one last thing: one of my colleagues, Mr. Kashilula, died last weekend. He was driving into Windhoek and got into a car accident. I don’t have much to say about this other than that it was sad, not only that it happened (and that this man’s wife also died recently, and they left behind some rather young children), but that while the faculty at my school was clearly grieved, they weren’t really shocked. I don’t know exactly what it is; it just seems like the experience of death here, of someone dying, is so much more a part of life that everyone knows than it is back home. I guess that was the saddest part: that I was at the funeral, confused, trying to follow what everyone else was doing, while all of my colleagues and everybody else in attendance knew every segment — every action, every movement, every aspect of the tradition — by heart. It was nothing new.

I hate to end on a somber note . . . so I’ll end on a disgusting one instead. Those gigantic millipedes that we saw around here in the beginning of the year — you remember, I took a picture of one and posted it on this very blog! And my dad left a comment, something to the effect of “That’s a snake, right?” — are back! We just spotted one outside. I guess the rainy season is on its way back in, and that must be when they come out to play. So a new era of huge insects is once again approaching.

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