Monday July 16, 2007

It didn't take long to realize that many of the students in my class did not have enough school supplies to participate in my lesson plans. The biggest vacancy was with pencils, which was a huge problem since most of my teaching centered on repetition and copying. I took a trip into town and was able to buy about 40 pencils for a few dollars, and felt pretty good that the next day all the students would be endowed with the resources they needed to start learning my english lessons. I did not realize the pencils were unsharpened until I got to class, so before I handed them out I had to sharpen them manually. Some of the students write particularly hard and I always kept the sharpener on hand to keep the pencil usable. It wasn't until the fifth sharpen that I realized there was something else going on with Azamani, a quiet little boy that sits in the back. After multiple trip up to the front to have his pencil sharpened, my eyes followed him back to his desk and i watched him hunch over and take a bite out of the newly sharpened lead. He then swallowed and, as he was about to get up to take another trip to the front, caught my focused eyes and gave me a look of desperate embarrassment. This is a child that receives so little nourishment at home that he must resort to eating pencil lead to satiate himself in some small way. I believe a moment like this is indicative of the larger problem that we must face in the third world. It is the daily battle between subsistence and progress that commands the attention of the people who actually have to live through it. How can we ask a community to work harder and build itself up when they have no step with which to raise themselves upon? It is moments like these that makes volunteers feel helpless. I suppose if you had to stay positive, you could use a story like this as proof that more needs to be done, and make it an example to prove to people back home the need for assistance. But after living through it today, it becomes difficult to put a positive face on the experience. Africa is not a place that is going to develop through half-hearted intervention and support. Unless more is done, people like me will be telling the same sad stories decades from now.