"Ah, this is a hard time-- this is a difficulty", and I tried to make sense of it and remember that energy I had possessed just an hour ago. Walking fast out through the Kifungo gates, bobbing up and down in a fluid stride, deafening the voices and faces of tiny students clad in blazing white tee-shirts. I didn't look at their faces and mumbled back at their Jambo's and Good Morning's, just wading through them all like a flock of domesticated doves, unfazed by my stomping feet in the dirt. So, the first class had been a disappointment. In fact, I was utterly discouraged and dejected to the point of implosion.

That morning, I had walked through a gray drizzle, leather agenda shoved officially under one arm, to inquire once more about the missing Madame Agnes. The English teacher was still sick, they told me. So I asked if I might start without her, and it was quickly agreed upon. Although there was a 6th level class scheduled in an hour, I said that there wasn't enough time for me to prepare and that I would come back tomorrow for the 5th level.
On my way back to the office, I tantilized myself with the possibility of simply jumping headlong into the experience and running back for that class in an hour.

Teetering in the office, there were 5 minutes before the class would start. I scooped my computer and little book into my backpack and set out, nervously, for the school once again. The principal escorted me to the correct alcove in the concrete compound and left me standing in front of twenty grinning faces-- faces that, for the most part, were older than mine. "D-o y-o-u r-e-m-e-m-b-e-r m-e?" I ask, like they were all retarded. A resounding "YES!" boomed back at me. Well, I'd committed myself for sure. This claustrophobic cell would be my prison for the next hour. An hour of people expecting me to have all the answers, and an hour of doubt when everyone found out how old I was, and how poor my French was. And, of course, the chalk broke on the black-washed, bumpy wall when I tried to write my name.

Well, the meat of the lesson was to be an excerpt from The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I had taken my laptop along to play the song for them, which turned out to be insufficiently loud in the din of high-school chatter, and the song well-beyond the students' comprehension level. I had overestimated their competency, by far. I hadn't translated the lyrics into French, or even come ready with any of the new vocabulary written in French. I had meant to enter into a semi-meaningful discussion, based largely on class participation and original thought, etc.. The class was, instead, focused on how exactly a guitar might weep and what the word "surely" meant, and whether or not I would marry a black woman. It ended with my conceding to a request for Bob Marley. "Get Up, Stand Up" moused out of my tiny laptop speakers while a real teacher sauntered in routinely and expertly began scrawling on the blackboard. I'm not sure if he noticed me. I said "G-o-o-d-b-y-e !" and was sent off with that same, unshaken enthusiasm. Despite their perpetual cheeriness, I was in a sweaty, confounded pit of despair and shut the computer's lid bitterly. Drudging into the schoolyard, I felt like Ms. Shirley in Anne Of Green Gables on her first time teaching at that wicked all-girls school. How could I have presumed to be at all qualified to teach? I wanted to cry.

My throat hurt and I was tired from going to bed real late and waking up at 5:30 to play soccer at the stadium. I staggered home to my bed in a self-disgusted stupor, nodded off miserably into a twenty-minute nap, and dreamed about how long these next three months would be. I wanted to get out of this place, get out of this skin. The switch from Western to Congolese cuisine, effective that afternoon, wasn't the comfort that I was looking for. Green heaps of lenga-lenga heaped up on my plate and the fufu tasted exactly like Africa. Burning my mouth on chunks of fufu sopped in hot, bright beef juices, I bore down on my plate in disgust. It wasn't the taste. It was this culture, this commitment-- the bizarre, ragged bear trap that clenched my feet in its rusty teeth, and held me in a place where I didn't belong.

When I was received at Tanganyika School an hour later by Mr. John under the white sun, I looked down at my red forearms and grimaced. He reproached me for forgetting the song-lyrics he had personally requested, and I reproached him for telling me to come a half-hour early. His giddiness and closeness kept on, though, and I wasn't amused.

I was counting on a smile to hide my weariness from these kids, and it reappeared instinctively as I stood in front of the fifty of them, all attentive and stuffed together.


Everyone was loving me, all at once. Every face sincerely in awe of who and what I could possibly be. Thank God they were clueless as to what I had been thinking about them all day, how much I had loathed them and myself-- flipped horribly inward, my soul like a black pinhole. And they never stopped smiling and neither did I, and everything went smoothly. Oddities that were bound to happen with me were simply laughed off and they loved me all the more for my silliness. I had, in that short break in my schedule, gathered a little more material, based on what I had learned during my first experience. I had all of the french translations that they asked for, and my hand became gradually less clumsy with its chalk on the blackboard. I called on students when they raised their hands, they stood up to attempt reading example sentences that I'd written, and they completed and turned in the assignment that I gave them.

One student had a camera and wanted to snap a shot of Mr. John and me in front of the blackboard. Then, lining up one after the other, students began paying the guy money to get their pictures taken with me. All with whimpering solemn lips, stepping up next to the Mzungu Teacher. Flash after flash of reasons to stay-- reasons to enter, once again, into this mad Congolese Carnival that cracks me like a whip at strangers and into wild adventures.

My throat was the only part of me that still hurt as I stowed away from the happy school, accompanied by John, discussing witchcraft and cannibalism. Whatever was meant to be accomplished wasn't done yet. That was clear, and I knew that there was much more, ahead.