Heat

It is hot. Clothes sticking to your sticky, sweaty skin hot.

Today we had a high of 36C - the highest since 1962, so the rumour is. Everyone is talking about it.

I love it. Four awful Michigan winters eventually replaced with the unbelievable feeling of spring slowly coming back to life have given me new, awakened senses, much more in tune with the air around me than I ever was before. I love how alive my skin feels in this heat.

But some things are that much more difficult in the heat. Sleeping, for one. Lying, limbs spread out on your sheets, windows and curtains flung wide. Hopeless. Also, teaching. "Miss Bell, don't you feel like you're melting?! I think I'm melting!", better than the glassy-eyed glaze that over takes most. At least melting they're still responsive.

Some days I remember it's good to be alive.

Glimpses: the cost of an accent

I’m not exactly sure why I’m at W given what it is and who I am but it is teaching me much about the world and my stereotypes of it. Things are not as simple as I like to think they are.

The other day in my AS Language class (17 year old Lower Sixes) we were talking about one of my favourite topics: language and power, and specifically, how language is power. And it is not only the words you speak that give or deny you power, it is also the way you speak those words.

In Zimbabwe, as in most places in the world, there are various English accents created by various factors ranging from native language to education to ethnicity to social class. As we seem to do so naturally, it is easy to lock people into rigid groups based purely on the sounds of the words that come out of their mouths.

W is a fairly elite, private girls school (yes, it’s true, I am teaching at an elite, private girls school). The majority of our girls come from middle to upper class families, many of them with connections to various significant, influential people in the country involved in important business, politics, and NGOs. Most are Shona speakers, with the “correct” kind of accent. The accent that marks them as educated. We’ve had discussions before about how accents shape perception and very quickly determine who is acceptable and who is not. They tell stories about the good-looking guy who is suddenly not quite so good-looking after he first opens his mouth. By the time they have left, even if they did not start out with it, our girls have the right kind of accent: one that will give them acceptance and privilege.

And yet, it is not as simple as the well-spoken, privileged versus the poor, unprivileged. I’m discovering very few things are simple at all. This accent of privilege comes at a cost. In the same way that the good-looking guy who does not speak correctly is marked and boxed, these girls are marked and boxed. They have lost the fluidity of their native language and feel out of place and uncomfortable when trying to speak it to relatives. Their visits to rural family are often difficult and it is obvious they cannot fit in the same way their cousins can. They are judged by their junior school friends who do not attend such an accent-defining high school and who ask them who they think they are. Their accent opens many doors, but it also limits where they can fit and who they can be in ways that are surprising and, I think, ultimately, painful.

Language is power. Accents give power.

But power comes at a cost.

No, it is not simple. I’m getting glimpses of why I’m here.

The other side of the pool

Tonight was our interhouse swimming gala at school. When I was in high school the interhouse swimming gala was one of the worst days of my year. Every year. I approached these days with knots in my stomach. There were never enough actual swimmers to compete in every race for the house and my best friend and I spent our time sitting way in the back trying to blend into the bench. We never quite learned how to do this. Even if our names weren’t on the list the day before you could be certain that someone would be absent or conveniently forget their costume or suddenly develop some strange, deadly disease that was passed through water, and we would be called on by some nasty, clip-board-bearing prefect to fill in. Of course, we were too much of a pair of goody-two-shoes (or just simply too terrified to dream of breaking any rules) to have forgotten our own costumes and no one would tell us where to pick up those deadly diseases the night before. So we swam, every year. Sarah was better than I was. Sometimes she came third or fourth! I came sixth or seventh depending on whether there were six or seven swimmers. Humiliating. If I we had a perseverance cup, I would have got it. But no, there wasn’t even a perseverance cup to hope for in the end. Just humiliation. Year after year. And, to top it off, our school was co-ed. Swimming galas are already a bad idea but having them at a co-ed school is just cruel and unusual punishment. Just at that time when you are self-conscious about absolutely everything about yourself they make you get in a costume and try to swim in front of boys and all the other girls who are way prettier and way more popular that you. And everyone, every single person—parent, student, teacher—at Les Brown pool is watching you. Contrary to what you would assume, they do not watch the person coming first, or second, or third, they don’t even watch their daughter or their sister or their girlfriend. No, , no, they watch you. Like hawks watching a poor, little, defenseless baby rabbit. You can tell galas were traumatic moments in my life.

But now – oh the happiness – I am a teacher. Ha! Now I sit on the other side of the pool. I give out the little disk with the number 3 on it. I get wet only when a dive fails to be executed quite right. I drink tea and chat to colleagues about which swimmers are their favourite students. I clap for the girl who wins the perseverance cup. Next year I’m going to get the number 6 disk. Those are my people.

Oh, it is good to be here, on the other side.

Wednesday already?

How on earth did Wednesday come around so fast?!

Well, it’s Wednesday again and one week since I last posted so that means I’m due, again. I knew setting myself a required time frame in public for posts was a good (and bad!) idea.

Driving home I was debating what I was going to write about, what I could write about. My weeks are crazy these days. A lot is happening but not a lot is necessarily worth telling. It is three weeks before our public exam students go on study leave before writing their international Cambridge exams and that means lots of extra marking of revision papers and essays. My favourite. (I always thought people made too big a deal about the woes and horror of English marking… they don’t). Plus, my part time assistant position in the Careers Department just became full time when the Careers counsellor had to unexpectedly take sick leave and ‘tis the season of university applications – ho ho ho. I’m giving my ESL students their oral (Cambridge!) exam tomorrow and not sure if either they or I am actually prepared for it. And on top of that I’m trying to still be a partly decent teacher to my non-exam/non-university-applying students – one of whom is a student newly arrived from China so totally lost in computers and Geo and Physics (but acing her Maths and keeping that teacher on her toes). Incidentally, ever wonder who the bright spark was who decided you go “up” and “down” a valley when you don’t mean “up” or “down” at all? When I tried to explain this to Susan, she looked at me in bewilderment, “But why?!” But why indeed.

So as I was contemplating all this and wondering where to start if I were to write about something and where I would get the energy after preparing for my oral, marking AS language papers, reading Chapter 8-10 of Pride and Prejudice, and making a priority list for University applications, it started to rain. And then, it started to really rain.

Huge drops hit the roof of my old truck (the one Jed thinks is his old truck) like bullets, making so much noise Ange had to shout her exclamations of amazement (though she's 13 and full of the dramatic so, no doubt, she did this for effect, too). Suddenly it was hard to see and the hard drops turned to hail, pelting us. It was hard to see. Cars slowed and put on their blinkers, “I’m here; I’m not going to stop like I should but please don’t hit me”. I put my blinkers on, too. In the space of a few minutes there were floods of water pouring down the road littered by the rubbish people had piled up outside along the road (we don't have a reliable garbage pick up so people create their own mini dumps all over). We made it home and ten minutes later it was over. Just a torrential rush of water and sound and movement and then, nothing.

I love this place.

10 things that make me happy in Zimbabwe right now

I am attempting to teach my Form 3s (15 yr olds) that anyone can write poetry and to inspire them to write and use words creatively. We will see how it goes; as soon as I mentioned the word "poem" in the same sentence as "you" and "write" there were horrified and dismayed faces all around. Who taught them they couldn't write? Sometimes I think good teaching is mostly un-learning (thank you, Calvin College) what they have already been taught before they get to the classroom.

Anyway, I'm using a list idea to get them started and to help give them ideas that are relevant to them. Yesterday they had to make 2 lists:

1. Ten things I know are true

2. Ten questions I have (for____/about____)

I'm interested to read those lists.

So, inspired by my own lesson (other times I think teaching is to a large extent how much I learn and change!) I've decided to make a list:

Ten things that make me happy in Zim right now

1. Hearing the sound of sprinklers as I pull up to our gate - a sign the power is on! (The beep of the microwave when it returns brings similar delight).

2. Being let in by a kind person when I am trying to turn right (across traffic ) off busy Second Street extension at 7:30 in the morning on my way to school. The level of happiness of this experience increases when you have sat there as car after car after car drives slowly past without letting you through, and you are about to give up on anything good left in the human race.

3. Ponyo - our ginger kitten who likes to leap onto your leg and claw her way up your trousers as you flail around trying to shake her off without doing further damaged to yourself.

4. Greeting the man who helps in the gardens at Arundel in Shona each morning. I was concerned that our relationship - which is based on my limited greeting knowledge and a comment on the cold weather - would end with winter but fortunately, he is a patient teacher and it is now hot and that is worth commenting on, too.

5. The weather itself - the sticky heat that is beginning to fill the air some days and the smell of coming-rain that tantalizes with hope.

6. Being called "Miss Bell" - it still catches me off guard every now and then.

7. Those rare and beautiful moments when it is not too hot outside, it is not a lesson after lunch or break time, there has not been a visit by a distracting male to the school, there has not been drama in the year group where one or more of them feel unjustly treated, the leaders of the class are for some reason on my side or too tired to lead a rebellion of whispers and looks from the back, the class has not been reprimanded by a previous teacher or come from a test, my lesson plan connects with my students, and suddenly they are all engaged and with me in learning.

8. Being totally stumped by a very simple but ridiculously complex question about a word, a grammar rule or the syntax of a sentence by my Chinese ESL student and laughing together as I admit that I have no idea of the answer and that, no, it does not make any logical sense.

9. Being in a place that is so familiar to me that I usually am not caught off guard by what people say or do. That, of course, is not to say that everything people say and do is positive and does not frustrate me endlessly at times, but that at least I am not surprised by it.

10. Teaching and being taught in my classrooms - the absolute joy of my life right now.

Here goes

So, a little known secret: I have always wanted a blog. Actually, I’ve kind of had three already. Well, almost three. Way back in the day, I tried a family blog when I was in the States and the rest of my family was in Zim. We were all supposed to contribute to it and keep ourselves and all the rest of our friends and family, on both sides of the equator, updated. I don’t think we had one post.

Then I decided to try another collaborative one with various friends who didn’t know each other (but all knew me) and we were supposed to all write a blog about great, important, soul-touching topics that we were all encountering in college and other places. Yah, no posts there either.

My most successful blogging endeavor was with a group of Calvin friends. I started this blog after we all graduated and left for wonderful and different parts of the globe. The blog was called “Patchwork Eats” and the idea was for all of us to regularly post recipes and stories about posted recipes from the different places we were eating. Good idea, hey? I thought so, and it started off well, but this most successful collaborative blog was 7 posts – 4 of them mine – last one 18 September, 2010.

So, I gave up my dream of ever being a blogger. But sometimes late at night the idea still haunted me. And then I started reading Nard Choi’s blog and I was both thrilled, inspired and terrified by the possibility. So even though I know I can never write like Nard and I fear failing with yet another another blog attempt, her commitment to writing and to honestly exploring and recording life through her words makes me want to try too.

And recently that dream that I buried with my recipe for Vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie has started to sneak up on me in the day time when I’m not prepared, and I've been composing blog posts in my mind.

So here goes. A blog. By Rebekah Bell.

The goal: at least one post per week (barring extended travel/work in remote areas, a terrorist attack on Harare, major injury to my right hand, or city-wide power cuts by the Harare city council – just covering my bases) for one year (got to push for some sort of goal).

Wish me luck.