November 17

The Form VI’s are doing mock examinations now, and I had to supervise for most of the day. This meant studying Japanese for more than seven hours while occasionally looking up to see if anyone needs anything. Unlike most of my friends I don’t have a class full of cheaters; A-level schools are different.
JICA (Japanese International Cooperation Agency) volunteers have a program which gives scholarships to up to 1% of a school, if the students can demonstrate profound need and academic ability. Yesterday Erina was going through the final round of interviews and needed another teacher to help. She believed the headmaster was going to help us but he postponed while the students were waiting outside his office and the duty fell to me. Later he came into the room flanked by three members of the school board and various students. He was showing Ndanda to the District Commissioner, the same man who was here last week to explain the lack of food for the students.
Four students were sitting outside the chemistry laboratory waiting for the interview, and the fifth was inexplicably absent. The first student, Abdallah, was the son of cashew farmers. He failed Mathematics that term but had recently switched from a different class and promised to work hard and make up the grade. I’m his current math teacher and didn’t recognize him. As he was leaving I threw out a last question, “Who is you’re math teacher?” He passed.
The other four students were disheartening; on the one hand I couldn’t help but feeling a great deal of pity, but for all four I felt at least some reluctance to give money. They just didn’t care that much. One, Samson I think, had been a Physics and Chemistry student who had switched to different combinations after some time at school.
“Why did you switch?”
“I like so much Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. But the teachers here are don’t come to class, there are no books and we have a great problem with practicals at this school. These subjects, Physics and Chemistry, are very broad and I don’t have a chance of learning them with the amount of money I have.”
All of these statements are false; we can do practicals and there are plenty of books, if he had bothered to look. But the worst bit,
“You know you are talking to the Form V Physics teacher and the Form V Chemistry teacher. How can you say we don’t attend our classes?” Samson went back to his line about the subjects being too broad, but he couldn’t dig himself out of that hole.
I don’t remember the next two students’ names, but they were both studied English and so their English was atrocious. I could barely carry out a conversations with these two; I wanted to switch to Swahili but English was apparently a prerequisite for the award. Their grades were decent, but this means almost nothing for Arts students; the English syllabus is especially bad. I asked the first one what subjects he was studying in history and was met with only blank stares. “World History? History of Africa?” Nothing. I asked the following one about his classes, supposedly English medium, and also got no answers. I broke the rules and tried Swahili – again, nothing. He told us he admired the head of the opposition party, but when I pressed him on details I couldn’t get any.
The last student arrived an hour and half late, and Erina concluded he couldn’t need the money that badly. We gave three students, the first and the two non-English speakers, scholarships; truly they were all coming from difficult circumstances. However I would have liked to see at least the tiniest commitment to their education. I don’t quite understand how they and their families could sacrifice so much to get to A-level, but they wouldn’t put any work at all once they arrived here.
Today I met two more Benedictine Novices, Brother Gregory and Brother Philbert. I was playing around on the keyboard and the church and they wanted to hear; they’ve had some brief music lessons and can read a simple score, but they had very little experience with music in minor keys and were impressed with a certain unresolved chord progression.