Preschool Friends

Even after just a week, and with limited ability to speak their language, we are getting to know many of the children at the preschool and to learn their personalities. There are some that hang back from us and others which have permanently attached themselves to our sides and ask for our attention, “Teacher! Chagga! Mimi!” (Teacher, watch me!) while they jump rope or show off on the seesaw.
Let me introduce you to a few of the kids and a few of their stories…



Eunice (spelled Yunis) - loves to jump rope, and she kicks off her shoes to jump barefoot, and carefully kicks the little rocks out of the way before commanding, “Teacher, Lengusha!” Her dress has a broken zipper in back, so I fixed it with a safety pin. She’s one of the older ones, and good enough at jumping rope to be able to jump two at a time with another child.



Kosimas (in front) is one of the youngest children, and acts like it. Mr. M’s wife Susan says that he is three, but he acts more like a two – wiggly, unable to sit down, goes around hitting other children and stealing their pencils, throwing their papers out the window, spitting or drawing on others' papers, and he likes to have his pencil sharpened but is really good at breaking off the tip so that he can bring it to us for sharpening again.

Many of the children are quite inventive with making toys out of what is available. On the first day, we saw kids take a short length of dried cornstalk, break an inch-long thorn off a tree and insert it into the stalk so that the sharp ends sticks out, and then take a dried piece of corn husk a couple of inches long, and balance it on the thorn, and then run with it across the playground which makes it spin like a propeller. It’s remarkably effective. Kosimas can’t write letters or numbers yet, and he can’t seem to leave the other kids work alone, but he is great with the propeller toy. Everyone seems to cut him some slack because he’s so young and obviously not ready for school yet. So we just try to ignore the little aura of chaos that follows him around the room.

Franciska (in the middle of the row behind Kosimas) is one of the alpha girls. Every schoolyard has them. She’s older and taller, bossy to little kids, sassy to adults, and adorable enough to make you want to forgive all of that. In the middle of last week, Mr. M called all the children up front and quizzed them on their vowels. If they could recognize them all, he sent them to the older kids classroom and that included Franciska, Eunice among the 30 or so kids. Jacob and Forrest are the teacher’s aides in that class, and they report that it is craziness itself whenever Mr. M is not in the room – kids jumping on desks, shouting, running around – etc – and that Franciska is ringleader of it all. On the playground she is very much in charge, and loves to dominate the jump roping (she is very good at it). She has a tender side too, she is the “mama” to the very-much-loved playground baby doll. Along with some of the other kids, she brings bread crumbs and crusts in the pocket of her dress and adds it to her porridge. This week she had shiny patent leather Sunday shoes and fancy knee socks and yesterday she brought a small package of cookies to school in her bag, and showed it around to everyone so that they knew she had it. That makes me guess that her family might be more well off than some.



The two Sabrinas, I have already introduced you to. They are about the same size and age and they play together very often. The Sabrina-with-earrings is dainty, light as a feather, and has the world’s most infectious giggle. In addition to her earrings she usually also wears a bangle bracelet and a necklace. Like some of the other kids, she wears castoff soccer cleats as her school shoes. She’s a great jump roper, even though she’s tiny in size. Her two front teeth are all but rotted away, but it doesn’t change the beauty of her smile. In this picture, she’s sitting next to a girl named Light (they pronounce it Lite-ee). Sabrina draws very detailed pictures and she’s very proud of her writing. “Teacher, tickee!” she will say, and wants me to make a red check mark next to her work, and then give me a high five.



The other Sabrina, Sabrina-with-a-red-hoodie, in this picture is pulling her friend over for jump rope. She carries a pink canvas backpack of which she is very proud. She chooses me to hold it for her during jump rope. Today, however, the zipper on the outside pocket broke – the teeth of the zipper would no longer interlace – and she was very sad about it and cried. I tried for a long time during recess to fix it, but it was beyond my skills. The poor backpack is all falling apart anyway – maybe I will try to find a new one the same size from one of the sidewalk vendors. Only about half of the children carry backpacks or tote bags. Most of them just carry their pencils or notebooks (if they have them) in small black shopping sacks. I can’t tell how they know whose is whose, since they all look the same. Maybe one of the things we can do when we get home is to send back an assortment of small tote bags and backpacks to help supply the rest.



Halle is very patient with the small children. One day the porridge was very, very hot. I burned my hand on it while ladling it into the cups, and Mr. M had to tell the children that it was so hot (moto) and that they should blow on it and eat it slowly. For whatever reason, it acted like a sleeping pill on little Nancy, another of the very young children. She began yawning during the after-porridge recess, and put her head on Halle’s lap and started blinking slower and slower and then fell asleep. When we went into class for the drawing time, she wasn’t interested in drawing, and she laid her head down on her arms and fell asleep again, and slept all the way until the end of school.



Asha is the girl in the yellow sweatshirt braiding Halle’s hair. She is quiet and serious, missing one front tooth and has a sweet, soft voice. She spent one recess helping me name all the parts of my face: eyebrows, teeth, nose, eyelashes, laughing gently at my pronunciation.



The last couple of days I have helped clean up the cups and spoons after porridge – this is Janet (“Yaneti”). Even though they have the exact same thing every day, everyone seems to relish it and there is never any left over. I give seconds to as many as I can, and they always eat every bit in their cups. As they finish, the children dump their empty cups and spoons into a large plastic basin. Then several of the kids haul it one courtyard over to the porch of the M house. Mr. M or his wife or his house girl pour several buckets of cold water from their outside tap into the basin, and give the children pieces of a plastic scrubber, rubbed onto a bar of soap. They use the suds to scrub each cup and rinse it in the water, and then drop it into a bucket of clean water for rinsing. The spoons are separately washed with more soap and water, and rinsed with clean water. So, okay, it’s not sterilization, but there is soap and water involved. There doesn’t seem to be a “chore chart,” just those that want to help go and happily do the washing, and it’s pleasant and cool washing the cups in the water and scrubbing them with soap suds, the chickens clucking around in the yard quietly and the sound of the trucks zooming by on the highway just on the other side of the house. One day after school before they went home, Susan (Mr. M’s wife) gave the children a little talk in Swahili. Although I didn’t understand all of it, I got that she was telling them that they should make sure to brush their teeth and to use soap to wash their hair at home. I wonder if they all have toothbrushes and face cloths at home?



Finally, there is Amani (one of three children with that name). He is rather ostracized by the other children because he is Maasai & he is called “Maasai” derisively by the other children instead of by his name. I mentioned before that he doesn’t usually take the porridge, although today he did. That made us wonder, was he just so hungry that he couldn’t resist trying it? Or would he get in trouble at home for having eaten it? He’s a very sweet child, not as rough-and-tumble as the other boys. He’s the biggest kid in the younger class – still can’t form his letters very well although he tries and tries, and is very earnest and is very happy when praised. He wears the school uniform with a too-small navy blue blazer over it, his wrists hanging out of the sleeves because it’s too short for him. He has gold “King Tut” sandals and a small blue-and-beige backpack. Your heart just goes out to those big brown eyes and to how hard he tries at everything, and to how on the playground he is alone so much of the time, standing apart from the other kids.

I mentioned the toy corn propellers. We have seen them make other toys too – one kid brought a car-on-a-string, made out of a plastic water bottle and 4 plastic bottle cap wheels attached with stick axles. One boy made a remarkably effective slingshot from a stick and some rubber bands, and another made a bow and arrow, which he shot at ankles when no one was looking. One of the Sabrinas used her long-sleeved shirt to tie the baby doll onto her back just like you see the women here do with their babies. The previous American volunteer told me that she would see girls on the playground practicing carrying things on their heads. Jacob discovered that if you lick a metal bottle cap it will stick to your face for a while, so yesterday kids went around the playground with bottlecaps stuck to their foreheads. Other games include “chase the teenage teacher,” “swing on the knotted rope that hangs from the broken swingset,” “pile as many kids onto the seesaw as possible,” and “two kids hold a stick horizontal, with one kid riding on it.”



(Photo: another homemade car-on-a-string we spotted on the roadside on Saturday, being pulled by a small boy)

Today (Wednesday) we went to school and found that a new college-age American volunteer has come and will be helping at the preschool until December, so we feel a little better not leaving Mr. M all by himself alone when we go home after next week. She taught the kids to play duck-duck-goose except with African animal names. For a while, everyone was sitting in a giant circle on the playground, something I have never seen!