i think i'm still holding onto my sanity... i've had to double check a few times this week though. its been a big one.
its been 10 weeks now in buduburam and the pressures of life on camp have started to show through this week more than before. i think this is both something to celebrate and struggle with. ive caught myself thinking to myself that life on the camp really isnt that hard for people sometimes (relative to other refugees and even other ghanaians or liberians of course) and i start to wonder if maybe my time and energy would be better spent in liberia. the faces and activities that i see on a daily basis around camp and at school don't differ that much from what i might see at home.. sure the kids are a lot thinner, but even that starts to loose its effect on me. the incredible abs and arm muscles that show through come to dominate over the fact that they exist because they're hungry. kids smiles and their constant demands for footballs make me forget that despite this energy, they may have only eaten once today, if at all. in that sense, i think its a good thing that i'm now able to see past it all without looking. maybe i'm learning a bit more about the camp and the liberians that i wouldn't have known otherwise. at the same time, its incredibly hard to deal with and so, you have to take it all with a grain of salt i guess.
anyway.. just as i get carried away with how okay things are on camp, you get weeks like this one to jolt you back into the realities of camp. on wednesday, just as i was getting to recooperate with sex and the city from a chaotic first day of summer school with 50 8-10 year olds in my class who could have cared less what me and my co-teacher were saying, my neighbour came to my door asking if i knew prince. everybody on camp is named prince, so i had to figure out which one he was talking about.. turns out, he was talking to the prince whose picture i have posted on the right. i'm totally obsessed with this kid, and his twin sister propsper. they're two years old and constantly come to my door to snuggle. recently, prince has taken to trying to open mouth kiss me.. together, they're the definition of kids that make you forget that people are hungry and in trouble. my neighbour came to tell me that prince had died that morning. he didn't know the details, but from where we sat on my front porch, we could hear prince's mother sobbing. it turns out that he came home from this massive birthday party the day before and his stomach had started to run. he was sick all night and in the morning, they took him to the clinic. a visit to the clinic costs about $1 to get the card to see a doctor, and then whatever the medication costs (for standard sicknesses, probably not more than $5). prince however, wasn't lucky enough to make it to the clinic... he died on the way there. after talking to more people, i found out that prince had been sick for awhile with a lot of littler things that didn't warrant a trip to the clinic. thing is that here, unless youre really sick (and can find an international volunteer to pay) you probably won't go to the clinic, let alone the hospital. there are so many what ifs with his story... i'd noticed that he was particularly light in comparison to prosper the day before he died but i thought that maybe i just hadn't noticed this before... kids get so small here that i have no idea what size a two year old should be. i just figuredf prosper was the bigger twin.. she's always been the noisier one of the two, so it was sort of fitting. i guess that wasn't the case.
prince's death, while it is far to ordinary here, has had somewhat extraordinary repercussions. for me personally, i lost a kid who i looked forward to seeing everyday. for others, i think its just brought reality to the happy little dreamland that we live in in our respective guest houses. while we very much live in the middle of this camp, with screaming babies and blaring music all around us, its still such a bubble that we seem to frequently get lost in with gin and charades.
that wasn't a hugely uplifting post i guess.... stories about my first 2 days at our summer school program should turn that around though. just picture me and another guy from the US attempting to control 60 8-10 year olds who think us as authority figures is the biggest joke ever. i spent yesterday shreiking at kids until i lost my voice because they just would not sit down. i gave up and started slamming the door until they listened. the first time i did it, all of them whipped around looking totally stunned. sadly, it lost its effect pretty fast. luke (co-teacher) and i resorted to a mass game of football that we seriously thought would result in a lot of broken legs. picture 30 kids chasing after the same little soccer ball on a rocky field. excellent. i'm sure our teaching awards are in the mail as we speak.
we've established a feeding program at this school (that is more substantial than the one they were aready running) and so by the time we were reading to give out the food, our numbers had swelled even more. after giving out bread and water, kids went totally haywire and we just sent half of them home. it got to the point where luke and i would go up to the kids and ask (okay, yell) do you want to be here? if they said no, they'd leave and then if they said yes we'd politely ask them (yelled) at them to go sit down and be quiet (shut up). more stellar teaching. i think the only lesson that they took away from that class was that 2 20 year old white guys cannot control mass amounts of children that respond best to flogging (hitting). god only knows what i'm going to do with them on monday when luke isnt there.... maybe i'll just go by a lot of sedatives or something.
its too early right now to say how i think the school is going. its right back to that sense of total helplessness that i felt when i started teaching with my grade 3s at the begining of my time here. i figured out the ropes though to them, and sent them off to graduate today happy with the little steps they've each taken (i sound like such a teacher-). i hope ill learn the ropes to thsi summer school too, but i just dont' ahve as much time to sort it all out and it feels like a much bigger project that i seem to be in charge of. a big wave of volunteers, who are pretty critical to the school right now, are leavnig in 2 weeks so thats going to be yet another wrench in the functioning of the school. i'm hoping the local teachers will be rested enough after 2 weeks that they'll be ready to come back and work with us.
wish me luck.
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