Some Assembly Required

When my boss came to visit last month, he brought with him a long awaited set of garden tools.  A rake, hoe, shovel, hand trawl, pick, watering can, and whelbarrow.

 

In what was apparantly a monsterous joke, the wheelbarrow was in pieces.

 

I consider myself a fairly self sufficient person.  I once assembled a doll house that Santa brought for one of my little sisters. Did not Lindsay and I rearrenged and put together our own furniture last year when we moved into our dorm room?

 

The wheelbarrow proved to be slightly more complicated, there were more options, less certainty, but I put it together as best I could, providing the neighbors kids with a loud lesson in english profanity at the same time.

 

what can i say, i am a multi tasker.

 

i pushed my creation the 2 km to my counterpart's house last Thursday evening, so that he could fill it with manure from the neighbors cow pen and bring it with his students to the fields friday at 4 to make a tree nursery for the 5th and 6th year class.  along the way a part fell off, but i didn't think it was a large problem, it didn't look terribly important and the matching part on the other side was still there.

 

when they were not there at 4:20 the next afternoon i started to get annoyed

 

then at 4:30 they  appeared, carrying the hobbled wheelbarrow, which was in terrible shape. My somewha haggard looking counterpart gave a sad shake of his head.  "Mariam, haadhe maa zeyn."  which translates to, Amy, this is not good.

 

apparantely creativity in putting together simple machines does not work out well.

 

i expect a letter from Rice any day taking back my honors.  or maybe bacherlors degrees do not include agricultural equipment assembly techniques.

 

my counterpart eventually fixed it, and i have wheels once again.

 

Other than that debacle my village time has been going well.  Two classes have made tree nurseries; and after the new year i will hopefully do the same for the younger students.  i also started tutoring my neighbors daughter in math.  it requires minimal language skills, actually few skills of any sort really since she is learning addition.  the first lesson was spent hammering the concept of "zero" into her tightly braided skull.  that 2 and 0 did not make three or did not make zero was responded to with a "huh?" that implied in saying this i was being violently unfair.  By the second lesson word had apparantly gotten out that the white girl was having class.  12 kids showed up, all shoving their pieces of paper in my face and stealing pens and demanding i teach everything from the alphabet to french.  It was a very loud lesson, with some children trying to add sums and learn to carry over in the tens collumn while one first year simply sat out of range of the lantern, but could be heard repeating "A! B! A! B!" for two hours.  Last night I snuck over later to just tutor mariam, the little girl, and brought some flashcards i had made to help her learn sums by memory. the kids don't even cheat right.  if you ask what 9 and 7 make they will write nine little hash marks on a piece of paper, and then seven more below thsoe; and then start at the beginning and try to count them all.  it takes three times as long as counting on your fingers and they always mess it up. When I took away Mariam's paper, I caught her trying to do the same thing usuing her toes.

 

Which brings me to my first new request.  if you find yourself with a burning desire to send me a package here, i would love some of those math flashcards for addition subtraction, multiplication, division, etc.  you probably still have some lying around the house from when you or siblings or children were younger.  I made some from index cards, but they are much to easy to cheat with , which mariam will do. actually any elementary school learning tools would be wonderful

 which also brings me to a request for crayons.  Two weeks ago I watched while the sweetest girl I have yet met in the village, a 10 year old named Fama, became terribly ill.  She couldn't walk, her grandmother had to haul her up by the arm to move her from the house outside to where we eat, and one day during lunch she had to guide Fama's hand to her mouth because she was so weak.  The same child that used to lead me home by the hand like a puppy and as always asking questions, now just lay on the mat with an expressionless face.  It was horrible. Every time I came back to the family she was worse, it was terribly frightening to watch helplessly while she faded away. You can imagine how happy I was on saturday when I came to eat at the home and found fama feeling better.  She wasn't quite recovered, you could tell because they were not sending her off to fetch something every 2 minutes, but she was up and about and smiling.  I had brought a notebook and a packet of crayons with me, and gave them to her as a gift.  It is a thing that every american school child has, but Fama looked at me like i had handed her gold.  We volunteers often do not pay for meals we eat with families, instead we give them gifts every so often. i usually gave fruit from rosso, since it is not widely available in the village, but it never occured to me to give little things like crayons.  I would like to do this more, but I only brought two boxes of crayons, and need to use the other for work.

 

That's about all that is new from around here.  I am in the capital now, most volunteers came in for Christmas.  It is really hard to believe it is here already.  Thank you for all the letters and packages these past 6 months, letters mean more to us over here than you will ever know.  But as you rip open presents on Sunday morning, remember that feeling, that is what it is like every month when we come in to the post office in Rosso.

 

Merry Christmas

love

amy