Small Consistencies
Why Victorian novels and verbs matter in Namibia
By Irene Yuan Sun
“Okay, turn the knob as far as it will go, and then yank it past that point until you hear a click. Then slowly turn it back while shaking.” He proceeds to shake the whole faucet so vigorously that his jowls jiggle.
It’s late winter in the rural north of Namibia, and the maintenance man at my school is in my kitchen, explaining how I can get cold water to come out of my faucet. A few days before, my faucet had begun to inexplicably produce only hot water, which was ironic in an area frequently plagued by both water and electricity outages.
There is, of course, no discussion of actually fixing the faucet. This fact would have irked me eight months before when I arrived as a newly minted volunteer teacher in Namibia, but by now I am used to the M.O. here: deal with it. For northern Namibians, basic survival entails coping with an arid, inhospitable landscape, a long history of colonial subjugation, and the pervasive, deadly presence of HIV/AIDS. I, a novice, had my hands full with relative trifles: goats running through my classroom, pieces of my bedroom ceiling falling on me, or inch-long cockroaches running through my house.
There is a lot to deal with, not least of which is the low scholastic achievement in English. At the beginning of the school year, I asked my eight- and ninth- grade classes to write letters introducing themselves to me, and I got what those of us in the volunteer-teacher community like to call “word salads”—collections of words randomly tossed together with no punctuation, syntax, or higher organizing principle. About half my classes fail any given assignment, even though the pass mark is only 40 percent.
This is not to say that these are not bright kids. Like children everywhere, they are curious, enthusiastic, and energetic when they are allowed to be. Unfortunately, the system in Namibia rarely allows them to be that way. First of all, there is the draining influence of HIV/AIDS. A few months ago, our regional government asked us to compile a list of all the children who had lost one or both parents. In my eighth grade class, 16 out of 29 kids made the list.
In addition, the language policy shortchanges the children. English only became Namibia’s official language in 1990, and where I live it is not the language of everyday exchange. In grades one through four, kids are taught in Oshivambo in all classes except for English. But starting with fifth grade, all the instruction abruptly switches to English in all but one class of Oshivambo. Unsurprisingly, the effect is far more wide-ranging than in these two language subjects. For example, kids who excelled in math find themselves suddenly unable to understand a single word in math class. The cost of this misguided language policy in educational achievement is enormous in every area of study as well as in students’ self-esteem.
Despite the overwhelmingly uphill battle, most of my kids try. This is the most striking difference between the kids here and the kids I grew up with in America’s heartland: there is very little apathy to education here. They know that as small as the odds are, education is still the only way out from a life of scratching the hot sands for a crop yield that barely enables subsistence. As a result, no one sleeps in class, almost everyone does their homework, and educational achievement is not a cause for being socially ostracized.
Indeed, I have had the joy of teaching some incredibly motivated kids here. One of my 12th graders undertook Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd in her spare time—no small feat when I had to explain to her that there are hills with grass in England (there is only flat sand here). Another student read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which prompted her to come to my living room one evening (with a friend for moral support) wondering, “What is fascism?” I panicked for a second, but happily, the memory of a college philosophy class floated to the surface of my thoughts. “Suppose the three of us were stranded in a boat in the middle of the ocean with no food,” I responded. “If we were democratic, we would respect all of our rights to life and sit there and hope for help. If we were fascist, the two of us would kill your friend here and eat her to stay alive, for the collective good.” They laughed, and I was proud of myself for explaining such a complex topic with a simple example. It was only later that I realized that neither of those girls had ever been in a boat or seen the ocean.
This incident encapsulates my biggest source of anxiety as a volunteer teacher in Namibia: that I am irrelevant. As the daughter of a doctor and university professor, I was raised with the notion that education is intrinsically valuable, but I find my views severely challenged here in Namibia. What right do I have to insist that my students spend hours learning how to make their subjects and verbs agree when half of them are orphans? By what stretch of the imagination do I assume that Victorian novels would be of any interest to these kids, who often don’t have the means for food, much less books? And in a society in which no one—not teachers, not parents, not leaders—reads for leisure, by what presumptuousness do I insist that my students should? Often, it seems to me that these questions cannot be answered in favor of my mission as a teacher here, that my talk of books, boats, and oceans is simply not relevant to the concerns of this poor, hot, sandy land.
This was the general vein of my thoughts one afternoon a month ago when Hilda, one of my ninth-graders, found out that her mother committed suicide. In my mind, the ultimate personification of despair will forever be the scene of Hilda crumpled over a bench, stick-thin arms and legs quavering with the force of her sobs. I collected her into my arms and eventually into my car, and I took her home. At her homestead, all the women, from young girls to grandmothers, sat in the shade and wailed in the high-pitched tone of primeval grief. I went down the long line, shook everyone’s hand, and then sat with them for hours, bearing witness and sharing in their grief. I could not understand a word of what anyone said, but the aftermath of death hardly needs translation.
I was sure I had lost Hilda as a student for the coming weeks. There would be extra responsibilities for her at home, and surely she would need time to deal with her emotions. So I was surprised when I saw her at school the next day and pleasantly surprised when she participated in class. She took a quiz the following day, even though I told her she could be excused, and did her homework the next night after that.
It’s taken me a long time to understand why Hilda came to school and did her homework so soon after her mother’s death. Part of it is certainly the urge to move on, to do anything—even reading comprehension exercises—rather than dwell on the pain of what happened. But on a more fundamental level, I think school has a healing effect on kids like Hilda.
After the funeral, Hilda spent several afternoons at my living room table doing vocabulary exercises. It seemed to calm her, as if after losing so much, she was asserting that she retained at least the right to do boring homework while her teacher read. In a world in which one’s mother could be here one day but not the next, the cycle of classes, homework, and exams often provides the only sense of stability. Of course, school is a poor substitute for a mother, but too many kids in Namibia don’t have mothers.
So after nearly a year here, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the most valuable thing I do is to provide a source of stability to my kids’ lives. They may not care about subject-verb agreement, but they care that I show up to class to teach them about it, that I respond to their questions about it, and that I grade their homework on it. It’s not much, but it’s a sort of constancy that’s sorely lacking in other areas of my kids’ lives, in which they have to deal with HIV/AIDS, poverty, and death.
Being in Namibia is, above all, a humbling experience. I look at the powerful forces affecting my kids’ lives—poverty, environmental decay, the AIDS epidemic—and I can’t help but admire their spirit. After all, this is the sort of place in which it’s a chore even to turn on the water faucet. But I’ve learned that in order to survive, I just have to deal with it, even if I look ridiculous shaking a kitchen fixture. And in the moments when I’m not shaking the faucet, I hope the little consistencies I’m providing are helping my kids, who have to deal with so much more than a faulty faucet.
Irene Yuan Sun graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 2007, with a degree in History and Science and a focus on African history. Due to this interest, she then went to northern Namibia as a volunteer teacher with the WorldTeach (www.worldteach.org) program. She currently works as a management consultant and lives in New York.