Linguistic Mis-steps

So today, I was teaching on duple and triple meter. I was using rhythm syllables and having students keep beat to “discover” the meter of the music we were singing. But surprisingly, my usually very well-behaved students kept laughing and making faces at each other. I could tell that the syllables, which mean nothing in English, clearly meant something funny in Maa. I rebuked them for their poor behavior, and said it was unacceptable to laugh, these are words that help understand meter, they don't mean anything, yadayada, and moved on.

After class, I went and asked Joseph, who has basically become our cultural guide, why my students were laughing. I discovered, that “du-de” (which is rhythm syllables) sounds very much like the shortened version of the word for feminal private parts in Maa. I also learned that “Today” sounds even more like the same word. It dawned on me that in every class I have been using at least one song with the word today in it. Welcome to cross-cultural teaching with middle school students.

Cross-cultural faux-pas

So today, I was teaching on duple and triple meter. I was using rhythm syllables and having students keep beat to “discover” the meter of the music we were singing. But surprisingly, my usually very well-behaved students kept laughing and making faces at each other. I could tell that the syllables, which mean nothing in English, clearly meant something funny in Maa. I rebuked them for their poor behavior, and said it was unacceptable to laugh, these are words that help understand meter, they don't mean anything, yadayada, and moved on.

After class, I went and asked Joseph, who has basically become our cultural guide, why my students were laughing. I discovered, that “du-de” (which is rhythm syllables) sounds very much like the shortened version of the word for feminal private parts in Maa. I also learned that “Today” sounds even more like the same word. It dawned on me that in every class I have been using at least one song with the word today in it. Welcome to cross-cultural teaching with middle school students.

Birthday

January 17th I celebrated a quarter century of life or as my Dad said, "One score and 5 years ago, Mom brought forth on this continent a new redhead, dedicated to the proposition that everyone should sing, play violin and piano."

My first birthday in Kenya was uneventful as far as birthday activities go. The Maasai don't celebrate birthdays and I was too tired from my first week of teaching to care about a party.

Since it was Sunday, most of the day was quite full anyway. We led our Bible study on John 9 and awarded our first Maasai Bible (thank you Clarks) to the person with the best attendance and punctuality. Then in church, I directed the youth drama on the Good Samaritan, which led into Matt's sermon on "what it means to be a Christian." An added bonus, due to Matt's concise preaching, church lasted less than 2 hours.

As we normally do, we came home from church and listened to a CCF service, and we also listened to a talk from Urbana on the incarnation, which we highly recommend, called "Money and Power". Check it out! http://vimeo.com/8450561 Otherwise, we just relaxed. You might say boring, I say, sabbath rest.

Now for all of the wives who say that appliances aren't good gifts, I beg to differ. Matt bought me a blender and we got to enjoy strawberry-banana smoothies. That was a good birthday present. Not quite as good as ice cream... but definitely a nice birthday treat to end the day.

First Day of School

For those of you who didn't know, 2 weeks ago I started teaching again. In Kenya the school year starts in January. So, after students had returned to school, I made a visit to the headmaster of the local primary school and asked if I could start teaching music. He agreed immediately and said I would start Monday. I would teach one class each day, from 2- 2:35pm.

So, last Monday I woke up really early in the morning. What is it with the first day of school? No matter how many times I've gone to school, taught various classes-I still get nervous. I worried about what to wear, checked my lesson plans over and over, paced back and forth, sang through my songs, planned out and adjusted my activities, practiced my introductions, typed and re-typed extra ideas in case I had extra time in the class...

At 1:39pm I walked over to my first music class at the primary school. Students were on their lunch break without lunch(since the government still hadn't provided the necessary rations of maize & beans), hanging around in the classrooms and out in the yard. There were no teachers to be seen anywhere, so I just walked straight into the Standard 8 classroom and got set-up to teach. I was surrounded by swarms of students calling out "Nalotuesha!" and whatever other nonsense they came up with. I immediately looked them straight in the eye and said "Kaaji Mrs. Kistler" (my name is Mrs. Kistler) You will address me as Mrs. Kistler and nothing else. I will not answer to my Maasai name. You are my students. I am your teacher. You will show respect by calling me Mrs. Kistler."

I had to repeat this about 10 more times as various kids came in curious about me being there. However, this was met by quiet yes's and changes in attitude, for most. A few I had to give the evil eye (I think of you Carolyn every time) and remind them to give respect, but overall I was happy with the responses.

My class wasn't supposed to start until 2pm, so I recruited some kids to start writing down the names of everyone in their class (since I didn't get any class lists from the other teachers). They were still huddled together when it was time to start, so I just collected the paper as it was and got started.

I introduced myself again as Mrs. Kistler and had them practice saying my name about 10 zillion times, whispering, shouting, using different kinds of emotion, speeds, etc. Kistler is very difficult for the Maasai and most Kenyans. There is no hard 'r' sound in Maa or Kiswahili. So most people say "kiss-lee" or "kiss-lah." Eventually their pronunciation sounded remotely like my name, so I figured I could move on. I set my expectations for behavior, and explained that those who were on time, attentive, good participants with a positive attitude, "the best" in my class, would get guitar lessons at the end of the term. I'm hoping that will motivate them...

We then did various music activities, a beat-keeping focus activity, I taught them a simple round (which proved too difficult, due to its minor mode) and did some basic tonal and rhythm pattern instruction.

I then handed out notecards and asked the students to introduce themselves to me, their names, ages, tell me about their families (siblings/parents/etc), interests, likes/dislikes, etc. I gave them 15 minutes. Some students by the end, had only written their name and their age...wow. This could be interesting. These students are most advanced in the school, the equivalent of our 8th grade, and they couldn't even write those few things in 15 minutes. Yes it was in English, but they do everything in school in English and Kiswahili. They've been studying English for at least 8 years now.

I ended class by playing a fiddle tune for them. I was hoping for the shock factor, but I don't know what they thought. They just stared.

So I gathered up my things and headed out. Later that afternoon, I got great enjoyment reading their responses. Some of the highlights:

Age: responses ranged between 13 and 20 years old. (I'm not sure if they actually know how old they are...)

Siblings: "I have 30 brothers and sisters and 3 moms." (welcome to Maasai-land)

Likes: "I like music." (yay!) "I like doing well in school." "Any kind of good teaching."

Dislikes: "Looking after." (caring for animals) "Doing drugs."

A few responses really struck me. You'd never hear these in the US:

Family: "I have 12 brothers, 7 sisters, 3 moms and 1 dad."

Dislikes: "Going without food." "Drought and famine."

Eclipse

Remember how when there was an eclipse, you could make those little "eclipse viewers" at school so you wouldn't blind yourself. Well, yesterday we had a partial eclipse and some of the church windows acted like eclipse viewers, projecting the eclipse onto the church wall. Check it out:

Those cheshire cat smiles are the sun being blocked by the moon.

Who knew our church could second as a celestial viewpoint?

Eventually the staff decided to distribute food at the riverbed since they were unable to get the truck to cross. Not an easy task....

Trying to get the food truck out of the mud.

Carrying food from the truck to the other side of the river.

Simion in front of the riverbed cliff. This was cut by the recent rains and prevented trucks from crossing. Yes....this is a road.

Food For Work

Unloading and carrying food at the riverbed
The Enajooli Donkey Cart

This week was quite an extravaganza of Food for Work activities. Coming into the week, we knew that rain had deteriorated the already less-than-German "roads" that would be used to transport food locally. We sent some of the staff to scout out the roads to figure out the best way to get the food from Nairobi and then distributed locally.

By tuesday, it was clear we were in trouble. The one, and only, road to Mosiro (adjacent region to Ewuaso....seen as the Maasai hinterland) was completely washed out, including one spot where the river had dug a trench about 2m deep through which any heavy truck could not pass. The plan was to bring the food to the trench, unload it, move it by hand to the other side, and then reload on a truck coming from the Mosiro side of the trench.

Wednesday was distribution day and I, fortunately, stayed at home waiting for trucks to arrive. By 7pm I started to wonder if and when they'd show up. The first truck arrived at 10pm, almost every truck got stuck in various mud pits and riverbeds. The people who receive food were supposed to unload the truck, but were angry at having to wait all day, so they decided to unload only the first truck and let any other trucks wait till morning.

The other trucks were stuck outside Ewuaso, where Sam and Simion (MFSDP staff and FFW manager) were trying to unload, and reload various trucks to help them pass through especially poor stretches of road. They didn't sleep all night.

8am the next morning, I meandered over to the church and saw the 3rd and 4th truck arrive. A truck had arrived over night and was unloaded by 3 people (a process that took 3 hours!). Normally, one truck is loaded or unloaded by 10-20 people and takes 45 minutes......

Once all the food arrived in Najile, it was time to redistribute it to the local centers. I was sent with my friend Nchachu on my motorcycle to scout out the road to a particularly distant center. Why didn't we just call them on the cell phone (every Maasai has a cell phone it seems).....because there's no reception in half the local centers so we had to undertake a voyage to survey the road.

The road was bad. For anybody who's never seen non-Western roads....it's like offroading...minus the fun and minus the "being able to go fast"-ness. We weaved our way over rocks and sand and rocksandsand, crashed once, and were chased by 6 ostriches (not to be fooled with....recently they started pecking at Simion's motorcycle, forcing him to abandon bike and hide in the woods!), before reaching Olentoko church. Instead of going out further to the center we were supposed to scout out, we asked the locals at Olentoko if they thought the road was passable. I said, "as long as you know you're the ones carrying the food by hand if the truck gets stuck...."......

I sat around the house in a tired stupor for the rest of Thursday before round 3 on Friday. The Mosiro trucks had got waylaid thursday night because the trucks on the Mosiro side had went home before our trucks arrived. We sent those plus another truck to do a massive load, unload, reload, and then unload project, to be manned by about 400 people to move about 35Tons of food. I stayed at home. We're praying that the food makes it safely!

One final note, in Enajooli, (between Najile and Ewuaso), the unloaders left before their food came. This is a major no-no and the food was thereby sent to Najile where the Enajoolians had to get it themselves. So, while loading a 10T lorry, two small donkey carts pull up to the church door. Yes, Enajooli got 4 donkeys to bring their food. It was pretty amazing.

Will post pictures as soon as Simion comes back with the camera.

PS. there was a partial eclipse today

Conservation Agriculture

During my break for Christmas I decided to start a garden using a technique called Conservation Agriculture (or Farming God's Way, which I think is a little presumptuous). Basically the idea is to minimize inputs (like fertilizer and sprays), maximize rain water (through heavy mulching) and work with care. The end result is often increased yields in even marginal growing areas. Check out this website to learn more about the basic principles: www.farming-gods-way.org

Maasai Hand Signs Part 4

Six: ile (ee-lay)
The motion starts by tucking your pinky under your thumb and then you flick it in an upward motion. Usually the motion is repeated.

Seven: napishiana (nah-pee-shah-nah)

There are 2 variations on this. The one showing- with all fingers up, you wave your middle finger up and down (and the others generally move with it). Some Maasai will use their pointer finger instead of their middle finger.