White Ants anyone?

Things are wrapping up with training and we are all so ready to go to our sites.  But as I prepare to leave my Home Stay family, I leave with a bit of sadness.  I'm attached to this lovely family who have taken in this Mzungu and welcomed me as one of their own.  There is so much laughter here in spite of the hardships.  Earnest and Namboosa bring in their school work or scraps of paper to draw pictures while I do MY homework.  They have two pencils and a crappy plastic pencil sharpener between them.  I bought a better sharpener and it was like Christmas. They do their homework by the yellow glow of a kerosene lamp.  It's hard - I can't see a thing....   School assignments are often drawn individually on a piece of cardboard torn from a thrown-away box.  There are no textbooks. My thank you gift to them is the money to supplement what they've been saving for years to finally get electricity run from the street to their home.  It will change life.

Tonight, as I studied Acholi, Earnest brought in a handful of pieces from an incomplete Snow White puzzle and they began to stick pieces together with no concept of matching patterns, colors, border pieces - concepts that are already well in place with 10 year olds in the US.  I joined them on the floor and in that short period of our putting the pieces together, there were many "Aaaahhs" and "Yesses" of discovery of matching patterns and re-creating the design, not just pushing pieces together that sorta fit.  It was a new concept - these pieces make a picture.  Because of our educational system in the States, and things that are just built in to a culture of education and opportunity, we take many processes for granted, not particularly realizing in the moment how much teaching is going on as we spend time with our kids.  And these beautiful children are actually quite well supported in their education, because Florence their grandmother who is putting them through school, is highly educated and very intelligent and works with them. I begin to see why problem solving, abstract thinking and so on are lacking in the culture at large.

Yet - a bit later I heard this banging going on and saw them hammering a piece of scrap fabric into a random shape of wood, using another piece of wood as a hammer.   I couldn't understand what he said he was making, so I watched - my curiosity mounting.  Pretty soon, he slipped a piece of old foam from a defunct mattress into the pouch he'd made and nailed down the other side.  He'd made an eraser so they could write their math problems on the concrete floor and use it as a chalk board.    Last week he was making a rake out of a plastic part, some rope and a stick from a tree.  There is no lack of intelligence, just opportunity and teaching.  These are my days here - discovering how part of the world puts life together using only what's available.  Every day, I learn some use of a something I would not have considered a resource: urine poured around the garden to deter pests - ash from the cooking fires to deflect a trail of ants.... etc.

And then there are white ants:  actually monster termite looking creatures that come out of mounds as tall as I am.  They are called white, because they have pearlescent white wings about an inch long.  These are a delicacy and the guard at our training site was collecting a bunch in an old hubcap, saving them to saute later as a tasty snack.

And on that note folks, I'm folding myself into bed and tucking in my insecticide treated mosquito net as sounds of night-song and drumming waft through the window from the school behind the house.  I'm going to read some distinctively NOT Acholi and try to defrazzle my brain to get ready for another day in Africa.

I but maber (Sleep well)