Last lessons

Day 20 – May 23

Today’s commute beat them all, as it started pouring rain at 5am and didn’t stop until well after we had arrived at school. That meant an hour and twenty minutes of (mostly) walking, and because of all the rains, the buses were only going part way up the road, leaving us to hike the rest through first corn fields then coffee fields, clutching umbrellas and trying to keep at least a small patch of clothing dry.

Fortunately, I was able to start my classes just 30 minutes late, bus since I had planned a full 80-minute class, I had to do some revisions, especially with the first group. With the rain as well as the fact that it was the last day before exams, the students weren’t really in the mood for a regular class. I pushed on though, and we had a fairly good lesson about finding important information in newspaper articles. At the end, I distributed the paraphernalia I had brought from Canada. I had bookmarks with the text of the national anthem, flag stickers, and mini paper flags. I had honestly thought that none of the students would want the paper flags, but in fact they were the item that went fastest – almost all the students wanted one. We then took a class photo.

I repeated the process with each of the Form II classes, although for some reason things got out of hand with the souvenir distribution in the 2C class. They were like lions fighting over a kill! I had to stop things completely for a while to get order back. Afterwards, I visited the Form I classes to distribute the Canada items. The flags were gone so I added the flag pins to the mix, and they went like hotcakes.

By the time I had finished with everything, it was past noon and little time left before leaving to file my reports. I gave out Canada stuff to all the teachers in the staffroom, and they were immediately enthralled with the words to the national anthem on the bookmark, so much so, in fact, that they asked me to sing it. I had my laptop so I put the music on and sung along with it once, and then they insisted on hearing it again so that they could sing it! Finally, they made me sing it in French just to hear the sound of it. It was a lot of national-anthem singing for one day.

There was no word at school today about the fracas after the soccer match yesterday. Despite the actions of the girls and of the teachers, I had decided to keep my mouth shut on this one. The reasons were a little bit selfish: since I’m staying with the headmaster, both the students and the teachers would have known it came from me, and I didn’t want to sour the last week (or my last day of teaching) with them all suffering punishment from the headmaster. The kids have it bad enough as it is; they don’t need any more beatings.