Aaron Snow and I came from Kenya together. I was overjoyed when we were sent to the same region of the country together, but in fact I rarely see him. He lives in a Seminary school 19 km from the main road and no public buses operate near him; the only way in or out of his site is on his school’s landrover. To get food, he must walk for a half hour and choose from rice, beans, or maize flour - the local delicacy is samaki mchango, “sand fish,” meaning rat – but Aaron is a tough kid, tougher than anyone else in our training class and he loves Rondo. I went to visit him last weekend, just before Christmas.
Rondo may be isolated but it is gorgeous, situated on a plateau overlooking a vast stretch of wilderness. Aaron showed me his garden, where he is growing all the local staples, and his new chickens. One of them lays an egg every day. I pay up the nose for my eggs, but at least I won’t get bird flu when the next epidemic rolls around. We spent most of the weekend with one of his other teachers, who graduated from Rondo three years ago and is now plans to enter university next year. On Sunday we went to the nearby village to hang out, where Aaron chatted with all the babas and showed me the newsletter project he had started, Mazingira ya Rondo. Mazingira loosely means environment, but it doesn’t have the same natural connotations and if a native Swahili speaker asks about the environment of America he wants to know about more than, say, animals. This particular newsletter, written mostly by his students, included a section on HIV-AIDS, an interview with a primary school teacher and a short section on Barack Obama.
At night in Rondo we wandered from staff house to staff house. Starlight and fireflies, about ten times as many as on a typical New York Independence Day, compensated for the lack of electricity. Constellations seem stupid when the stars are not so bright – why a dipper? – but if you find Orion’s belt, the rest of him does fall into place immediately. I left early Monday morning.
The trip was both uplifting and depressing at the same time. Aaron is beautifully integrated into his community, he speaks excellent Swahili and his secondary projects, apparently, are moving forward. I had just discovered my Physics students had learned nothing over the entire semester. Such trips function either as an impetus to try harder or a impetus to give up; I think I’m leaning more towards the latter.
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