T.I.A. is something a lot of the volunteers say when we are struggling with something that we would never struggle with at home. It stands for "This Is Africa," and sometimes, when we're really annoyed, we add an "F" in between the "I" and the "A".
This week, we had an excellent "TIFA" moment, that can now be seen as somewhat comical in retrospect...
On Tuesday, our school jeep/bus driver had a death in his family and was not able to pick up the kids that ride to school. Some of the volunteers decided that we should hire a daladala driver to pick up all the children and bring them to school for the days that the bus driver was unavailable. Trying to be supportive, I agreed to help and see how it went for the first day. Scottie wasn't feeling well Wednesday morning so I left with another volunteer at 6:50 a.m. to take a daladala into town to meet the dala driver we had hired for the day. This in itself was a complicated process, because we did not even know exactly where we our meeting place was. By 7:30 in the morning, we finally found our meeting spot, the rented dala, and four other volunteers. We set off with Baba, a man who works at our school, to pick up the children. The pick-ups took forever. I think because many of the parents didn't see the jeep picking up the kids at the normal time, many assumed that there was no school that day, so at most of the stops we had to go find the children, and then wait for them to get ready. One child was so upset when he saw a bus full of his peers on his supposed day off, that he started to scream and run away from his mom. On top of it all, the dala we rented (as recommended by our director) was old and crappy, and the bumpy ride up the hill was pretty scary. All in all, it took us two hours to get to school with the kids, who all arrived confused and disheveled from their unusual morning.
Because we arrived so late, we assumed the teachers would have started the morning as usual, with the children that walk to school (about half of the students). Unfortunately, no one had done this, and no one started to cook the morning porridge, so us volunteers had to start lessons immediately after getting off of the dala, and the children went without their morning snack. All of us were already exhausted at this point, and a little annoyed that the teachers hadn't started anything without us, but we tried to roll with it and make the best out of the day. Scottie, showed up right around lunch time, which was awesome, because we definitely needed his help.
We asked the daladala driver to come back to school at 2:00 to take the kids home, because we figured it would take another two hours to get all the children back home. I think maybe one of us jinxed everything by commenting on how quickly the first few drop-offs were going, because as we turned down a hill to drop off one of the children, the axel right underneath where I was sitting made the most horrifying noise, and our dala broke down in the middle of the road.
Now at home in the States, there probably would have been three or four ways to get ourselves out of this situation and get the rest of the children home quickly, but remember, This is Africa. At this point, we had five volunteers on the dala and six children with special needs. One of these children (who is actually 25 years old) has a form of dwarfism and can't walk or be reasonably carried, and one of the children has a fairly severe form of autism. Clare (another volunteer) and I, could not take the children off of the dala for fear that some of them might run, so we stayed on the dala with the children and tried to keep them occupied. Our driver said he was calling another dala to come pick us up, but actually, someone simply came with a tool to help fix our dala. I think there was a lack of communication occurring at this point, because all we really needed was to get the kids off the hot daladala and back to their houses, but no one was able to do this for us. All of the volunteers outside the bus were frantically calling people to come pick us up, while our dala driver continue to try and fix our dala.
Inside the dala, poor Samwely was sweating bullets he was so overheated, and Neemya, our little girl with autism, was starting to lose her patience. I guess it was pretty crazy to even have those children on the dala, because it is so outside of their normal routine, that no one could reasonably expect them to keep it together for the entire ride, let alone for something crazy like it breaking down. At about the 45 minute mark, little Neemya peed herself right next to me in her seat on the dala. On top of the awful, awful smell, she chose that following moment to need to be cuddled, and she sat herself right on Clare's lap.
This was about the time that Clare and I desperately looked at each other and tried to laugh about the situation, because I think we were both so close to crying we didn't know what to do with ourselves. It took another 30 minutes or so for the dala to get "fixed," which involved a lot of scary banging and dropping of the dala while we were inside of it with the children. We also ended up being harassed by the dala owner, because he felt we were wasting his money, and he insisted that he should not have to return any of our money (40,000 Tanzanian shillings) for the dala breaking down. I think we told him that if he could get us all safely back he could keep his money for the day, but we would never, ever call him again.
Eventually we got all the children back to their homes and managed to get ourselves off of that godforsaken dala. All of the volunteers literally stumbled to the closest establishment and ordered a round of drinks. I don't know if I've ever been so dirty or exhausted in my life; it was probably the craziest day of teaching that I'd ever encountered.
Obviously, the volunteers decided that four hours on a dala in one day was too much for the children and the adults to handle, so we decided to cancel school on Thursday. Because of a lack of communication, a few kids still showed up to school on Thursday, and only seven children showed up to school on Friday, even though the bus driver was supposed to be back by then. We are hoping by Monday that everything is sorted out and all of the children are back.
Besides our absolutely crazy Wednesday, we had a pretty good week. We've made friends with some of the volunteers from school and had a good time going out to dinner and dancing with them on Thursday night. Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time discussing our frustrations with the way things are going with placement, but mostly, we throw up our hands and remind ourselves that, "This is Africa".
Miss you all!
Love,
Laura and Scottie
No comments:
Post a Comment