No Complaints!

No Complaints

Where on earth do I begin after a long absence?  Do I start with my sweet and soft spoken language teacher, the devastating hunger in villages, the gorgeous dances that celebrated the day of the woman or my life living with women religious?  It is hard to know where to begin.

 

I had planned to write a blog entry once a week but that seems to be the most challenging of tasks.  For my research, students here are ‘candidates’ in their last year of secondary school. 

Their lives are strictly regimented on this timetable:

4:00am                        Wake up

4:00 – 6:30am             Remedial classes

6:30 – 7:30                  Bathing, Dressing

7:30am                        Prayer and Flag raising ceremony

8:00am                        Lessons begin

10:40am                      Tea Break

11:00am                      Lessons continue       

1:00pm                        Lunch

2:00 – 4:40pm             Lessons

4:40 – 6:00pm             Washing, bathing, sport – anything you can fit into this precious 80 minutes.

7:00 – 9:30pm             Remedial lessons

9:30 – 11:00pm           Discussion

11:00pm                      Bed time to rest before doing it all again.

 

The girls don’t complain.  They pray, sing and raise the flag each day.  In fact, many of them have applauded the school for this regime.  They came here because THEY WANT TO LEARN.  THEY WANT TO SUCCEED.  Yes, you see heads down in the brutal, stifling afternoon heat and tired bodies struggle to stay focused during the lesson, but they want to be there.  The girls are happy there.  They smile, study and have an ability to focus more than almost any kids I ever taught.  They cheer on their teachers taking on the football team from the local bank. They love it all.

 

At times, I try to see if they’re just being polite.  ’Aren’t you tired?’  ‘Don’t you wish you could sleep a little more?’  ‘Isn’t this exhausting?’  The answer is always, in one way or another, ‘no’.  It’s more like, ‘this is what we need to do to be successful,’ or ‘I need a government scholarship to go to campus (university) so I need to do well on my exams,’ or ‘this is how my family will have a better life.’

 

There is no complaining.  Really, none.  I think about my high school days and all the complaining we all did.  We didn’t know what a gift our education was – it was a pain we must all endure to get to the eventually good futures we all believed we would have. For these girls, it is the challenge of their lives so that one day they will have the opportunity to live in a permanent house, not a grass house.  It is the chance to buy back all those precious and coveted cows dad sold so he could pay school fees this term.  It is the obligation to find a way to care for their mothers – women who have given every day of their lives and every ounce of their effort to collect firewood, cut trees to build a home, collect grass to build a roof, and hammer rocks all day in the beating, debilitating sun so that there might be a little money for their daughters to go to school.  It is for the illiterate women who sign into school visitation day by stamping their finger as a signature, for the women before and among them who had marriage forced upon them by parental arrangement for dowry and wealth, rape or inability to stay in school.

 

These girls are different.  These girls are now valued for their education.  They won’t be married off before they finish their studies.  They have real potential to receive government and foreign aid scholarships to university.  They want to pick their own husbands.  They want monogamous marriages, or religious life.  And in a country and tribe where remaining single is NOT the norm, they wish to remain single…because the responsibility of caring for their out of school siblings and uneducated mothers and pastoral fathers weighs so heavily upon them.

 

I’m rooting for every last one of them to succeed.  Even the girls that are so tickled by my accent that they mock it (albeit in a loving but annoying way) every single day. I’m rooting for the girls who get sent home because their sponsors stopped paying their school fees or their parents have no more cows or goats to sell.  I’m rooting for the daughter of a mother police officer who doesn’t make enough money in one month to pay even one term of school fees.  I’m rooting for the girl from the Ik village, because girls up there don’t go to school at all.  I’m rooting for the girls who have been told that they won’t amount to nothing because their tribe is considered to be inferior to others.  

I'm rooting for the women's day contest winner who plants a tree with hope for her future.  

 

I’m rooting for the girls.