Mount Zion

I learned half of a lesson in my sleep last night and the other half at Easter service. This morning I was in a school auditorium in a borrowed church, seeking a moment of faith and community on this special day. The pastor was talking about how grateful we should be that Jesus died so that we wouldn't have to. For a while now I've had the nagging feeling that fearing death so much that we have made a whole religion around avoiding it is a little too earthly a culminating truth for the God I've heard whispering in the winds. Resurrection, as the robed ones of my childhood promised, bought us another life on high once this one is spent. I am not debating the existence of heaven, but my lesson today helped me to settle something. I think that it is another death that we have been saved from, one that allows life to end as a symptom of hate and conflict and neglect. One that we choose while we're still breathing.

In my dream there was a great mountain with the head of a man. It was covered in snow and I walked to the top to ask him a few questions. I saw his head resting in brown soil with an ear to the clouds and asked "What is it like to be a mountain-man?" He lifted his head to look at me and said "Sometimes I cover my face with dirt and lay down to rest, then everyone thinks that I am a mountain and they let me be. Other times I am filled with great insight about what it is to be a mountain and a man, but when I speak no one listens." Amazed and upset at such a waste of wisdom I took these words with me to the base of the mountain.

A mass of people were assembling there to hold a church camp. A priest stood at the foot of the snowy mountain where the mountain-man's head could not be seen. The people were gathering on an iced-over pond that was leaking through cracks. "This is thin ice." I said "This is not the best place for all of these people to sit." But the priest assured me that all was well and carried on. He was directing people to put little square pictures of their faces into baskets. Everyone there was to sift through these pictures and decide who would go to heaven and who to hell. The big gamble was that on judgement day, whoever had guessed most accurately would win. It was like the door prize.

The service began with communion. Everyone was sitting in rows on the leaking, groaning ice with their destiny sorted out in piles of damned and divined. They started passing around bread. It was french bread still in the plastic sleeve. I watched as people gnawed at the bread through the plastic, then reached in and pulled out a hunk of bread to eat. "Why don't we just break bread together with our hands?" I asked. "We use the plastic to keep us safe from each other's germs." they whispered urgently.

This is as far as the dream went and I forgot all about it until my spirit started to quake in the school-auditorium church. Where my mind and heart have been quarreling there was suddenly a red thread tying the resurrection to the mountain-man. The death we have been saved from is one that happens walking, when we lose what we were born with: our vision, compassion, connection. When we learn to live on thin ice, judging one another and choking down an antiseptic communion. When we stop listening to the mountain-man and shape our faith around our fears. May the resurrection give us hope for new life on earth where we can invigorate our stories with choices and grace. Where we can be inspired to be alive while we're here and be spared the death of spirit that too many of us have suffered.

Stroll to the Banana Man

(again, please forgive my formatting, and enjoy the journey!)


On my walk to the banana man just out of town
I pass a line  broken bottles turned upside down
Once the welcoming vessels for a friendly drink
now warning to passers by "don't you even think!"
Still the sky thinks its welcome to fill these broken cups
only people and birds are not allowed up







                                                                                Just a dusty mile past this unwelcoming wall
                                                                                sits another broken site that speaks to it all
Once this playful train tooted "come and learn!"
now a neglected old crack that matches the spurned
Haven for beginning, where the roots are grown
and where the light of investment is not enough shown
I think of my students all shiny and fed
and worry 'or the cracks in where these children are led




                                                     
And then to the wisdom of an eons-old world
where progress is throwing but tradition's not hurled
And hands still know how to shape bricks from the sand
and heavy loads are still rolled by men on the land
From these building blocks of dust, a skyscraper will rise
as tradition and modernity wrestle up towards the skies

This dance makes its music but along with this beat
the waste that it produces lays roadside in heaps
Its sad, litter happens all over the earth
but here it overflows with growing capital girth
Where tree and grass wrappers are what's usually shown
their plastic replacements are also thoughtlessly thrown








I stroll down the road, walking, looking and stopping
then pause at a tree of pants to do some clothes shopping
These garments are stretched to show what they can hold
no shame in a bottom here, its round, proud and bold!
But really, the duds here don't grow on trees
hand-me-downs are shipped from 'round the world to meet Dar's dress needs











Just before I reach the trusty banana man
as I'm wondering if this place is a full or empty hand
With its keep-out fences and its forgotten schools
its age old productions and its brand new rules
I surrender to to the discord that trembles in me
that the tragic and the divine draw a dichotomy
To be here you must live with the trash on the streets
and the gracious gift of mangos hanging ripe in the trees

OIE (oddities of international education)

At a later date in a more lively state of mind I could elucidate several strange facets of the world of international education, but in this brief moment between dinner and sleep I thought I'd share two small curiosities that could happen only in my current situation:

1. Have you ever thought about the nuances of international curriculum? You would think that there would be math books in every shape, form and language- especially since a profit could be turned from such a production. Alas, just as in schools across America, here at the International School of Tanganyika we use Every Day Math, whose Ameri-centric bent becomes more apparent with each worksheet. In a county that uses Shillings, most commonly 10000tsh, 5000tsh and below, I am teaching quarters, nickels, pennies, and dimes. The thermometer worksheets are all in Fahrenheit, almost everywhere else in the world uses Celsius, and my very British team-mate has whited-out each time that it says "ballpark" in the estimation lessons because "America is the only place where baseball matters." I didn't realize the span of America's influence on the world until I left the country, there are second graders in Tanzania learning our currency system (of course I adapt it to include culturally relevant information, but they are tested on the dollar). My teammate can white-out every American term she can find, but we're using the curriculum of the red white and blue. Does this mean that we have the most progressive ideas, the most aggressive marketing, or simply the most comprehensive math book production? In my experience, Every Day Math is not the most well-engineered math program, but here it is  for better or worse, coloring my international classroom with even more America than I already inherently bring.

2. I am doing DRA testing to prepare for report cards (which, for those non-educators who have made it this far without leaving out of boredom, is a reading level test). I have this big cardboard box full of little flimsy books of varying levels of difficulty with corresponding fluency and comprehension trackers. Each day I lug it to a table outside of my classroom that we reserve for kids who need a quite place to work where the mosquitos will lend a natural consequence for all of the "bugging" they've been doing inside of the classroom walls. A child sits across from me and reads about a frog who learns a lesson, or a kid who collects rocks and I mark their mistakes and record their cute answers to "what do you think will happen next?" I was carrying on with this tradition today as usual when I noticed that the ground was covered with little gray bug wings about as narrow as my pinky toenail and three times as long. It looked as if there was a world war of the faeries or a cannibalistic termite ball on my front stoop in the night. They were everywhere, a literal carpeting of flimsy semitransparent bug wings, but no bugs! I was trying to focus on the accidental "why"s instead of "where"s and scrupulously tick off the words per minute, but my mind was inexorably repulsed and attracted to this curious sight. After wading through several student tests, I crunched my way over the forgotten battleground of disembodied wings to my next door neighbor's room and got the scoop: so before the rains here these winged maggots rise on the change in pressure, they swarm and are knocked to the ground by the showering of waterbombs. The rains are pretty ravishing here so I guess they just nail the poor things to the side walk. Their bodies are either eaten by birds and ants or are collected by people and fried for the protein. I have no idea why these poor little creatures find it necessary to come out at precisely the most deadly time there is, I don't even know what the things look like because all I could see for miles was the winged carnage they left behind, but I am certain that the entertainment that this fairytale occurrence provided me during an otherwise tedious task will fly beyond this stagnant wreckage to the hungry minds of you... my faithful readers and confidants!

Thank you for listening! Do share a response or two, I long to hear your voices!

International Insomniac

It is 3:28 am, just a few hours before I have to get up for school, a mosquito is buzzing ravenously outside of the guest bed net where I am hiding out, trying not to disturb Zak who is fast asleep in the other room like a normal person. I have no idea why I am awake, maybe I am experiencing 2 and 1/2 month late jet lag or maybe it was the coffee that I drank this afternoon under a grape arbor in the rain, maybe I'm turning into my mom or maybe I'm returning to my childhood tendency to be struck by prolific bursts of late night inspiration- I just hope it's a one time thing and the odd energy of this desperate city isn't getting to me! I tried meditation, focusing on the in and out breath, a montra of "why... because... why... because", the lullaby of the after-rain frog chorus with intermittent traffic codas, reading.... but the hours patiently slugged by and instead of a wink of sleep I am left with a story to tell, so here goes:

Moving to a foreign country, it seems is an act that rests on expectation made manifest in an unusual way, you believe that you are open to anything, as you are giving up everything that you know to enter into a new mindset, practice, language, climate etc. Having nothing to rest your expectations upon, you assume that you will embrace difference and accept growth as your only criteria for a satisfying experience. However, upon arrival you realize that growth and difference can and will happen in any unusual circumstance and that there is indeed a quality which you were hoping would color these inevitable components of change. I was hoping to traverse the gifts and challenges of the lifestyle that is natural for Tanzanians, to see the stories that make up the lives of families and communities of people tied to a history and land that are new to me. I wanted to learn to adapt my daily toils to fit the rhythm of a rooted culture, to hear the woes and witness the laughter that comes from Tanzania, to reach my hand out in whatever way I could to enter the give and take of a vibrant new facet of the world.

The strange thing about Dar es Salaam is that you feel the tension of people living in a developing city who are not yet comfortable within its streets. Few of the people that I have met grew up here, it is a place that people flock to with high hopes and then wrestle with to secure employment. The locals in business are trying to build structures with unripened stones, trying to wield plans knitted with green twine, trying to be steady in the inconsistency of an immature infrastructure. The excitement in this lies in the hope that it is developing, that this city is on its way to being the prosperous place that its inhabitants hoped to benefit from. The frustration lies in the fact that corruption, complacency, expired policy, inadequate facilities and a work ethic and organizational schema that are better suited for rural life leave those working towards progress spending most of their energy treading water.

Colorfully blurring the chasms between the tall buildings and flustered businesspeople are the clanking wares of entrepreneurs who have come here with the sacks and buckets of smaller places along on their backs. They hold trays of cigarettes and candies on their heads, ride bikes with ice cream coolers welded to them, man carts loaded with papaya and banana under shade trees,  thrust nets with soccer balls and imported electronics through car windows, or sit all day by the road with naught but a cup in their hand. These people are calling and making kissie noises, clanking stacks of coins rhythmically in their hands and spending most of their energy trying to attract buyers. If you so much as glance you will have to shake them off. Especially if you are white, they are ready to try to get as much as they can out of you, and once one has caught your interest, more will flock, vying for the spot of the lucky one who will seal a deal. This business model works because local people are more accustomed and financially able to deal with market-style shopping rather than the largely fancified grocery stores and transplants quite like this store-to-your-door method. It works, but just barely, survival is the realistic objective of this business model, not progress.

We have met several people on our adventures (talking to strangers has always been our forte, we are slowed a bit by the language barrier, but still try) who express that they migrated to this city hopeful that they would find work and are left hungry and stuck just looking to make their ticket back home. It seems that many find the expectations they built on "city" and "travel" burst by the reality of tough economics and resilient cultural divides. The expectation that I (we) are struggling to reckon with is not so much financial as it is about the currency of cultural exchange. As you may have realized by what I have already portrayed, there is plenty to wrap your head around in this place, I can't complain that I am not being challenged. I also do not mean to paint a bleak picture of our adventure, as it has and will continue to change the trajectory of our lives forever and we are extremely lucky to be able to live such an unusual chapter in our lives. It's just that we have found ourselves in a peculiar slice of Dar which is quite misaligned with the dreams that we had tied to "Tanaznia".

We ride an insulated circuit of expats. We find ourselves frequenting dining establishments where the only local people present are wearing aprons and watching less than mediocre presentations of art and music created by "adventurous adults" who left home without their talent but can flaunt freely in a place where there is nothing else to see. I have gotten to chat with Maasai warriors, but only as they hold an umbrella for me in the rain or help to park our car with their fimbos (cow herding sticks). I've gotten to eat local mishkake (beef) on a stick and cassava wedges cooked over a fire by the seaside, but paid more than a few shillings with the extra tax of the amoeba. I get to be surrounded by people who have lived all over the world, but when I ask why they like to live here, an overwhelming response is "at home I couldn't have a cooking and cleaning staff and take five star vacations with my family each year." I have met some brilliant parents who are revitalizing the local emergency ward, advocating for Save the Children, doing malaria research and trying to open the possibilities of the world up to their children, but am concerned when these children report more time spent at the yacht club than interacting with the city and who poll in the majority for having never cleaned their room because they have a maid.

I continue to poke and probe this place and whomever I can find driving my pijaje, picking up my students, guarding the gate, holding the umbrella or sleeping peacefully in the bed across the hall and I will work to break out of the loop in the small moments that I can find after managing the work in my classroom and my budding home, but I am coming to terms with the fact  that I had expectations for intimacy with this place and they have been strangely displaced by a distance that is more complex than my pre-Tanzania Leah could realize.

Where We Walk Each Day

Hujambo!
I have been off traveling, teaching and living all tangled up in the strange new world around me. The hole in my storytelling is due to the presence of a kiswahili class, an after school musical, a some new friends, a myriad of weekend adventures, the birth of a new collaborative life project and a difficult visit from some amoebas as well as my struggle to find the beginning of this thread. Where does one start start when everything is worth talking about and few things are tied tightly enough to my listeners' prior knowledge to tell about without front-loading?!
My mom, in true GT teacher fashion has accommodated for my learning style and her own anxiousness for news by suggesting that I start at the beginning and use pictures. 


So here is a picture tour of our home: (please forgive the layout issues, I can't seem to get them set and need to sleep, so follow the bumps and bruises in solidarity with those that we've run into on our journey!)

This is us

(invisible costars= Zak's amoeba and

bacterial infection, my lonely amoeba)

This is our building

We live below a couple who

are about our age, and above 

a lovely family with a bubbling

little globally integrated infant,

our IT guy also lives here,

but that doesn't mean that the

electricity and internet

behave themselves. Its safe

and comfortable and we have

running water, which is more

than we were really expecting!

This is our car

Zak was adamant about getting a car right away and its been very helpful. It opens the doors to adventures that would be quite tedious otherwise. It has two levels of four-wheel drive so we can scale the massive potholes of Dar's lovely roads and drive through sand and shrub on more rural escapades. Zak drives because not only is it stick (on the other side!) but no one obeys traffic laws and we all know that defensive driving is not one of my god given gifts!

                                        This is the guard house

We live inside of a walled-in compound

that includes several housing buildings          

                                        like ours and the entire elementary  

                                        school. At each gate there are "eskaris" 

                                        or guards who let us in and out. They are 

                                        the nicest guys, showing genuine 

                                        concern for our ups and downs. We have  

                                        a mutually beneficial relationship based 

                                        on language exchange, they arm us with Kiswahili phrases when we 

                                        leave the gate and they are eager to practice their English with us. 

This is a cool woven fence and our water tower

The water tower is quaint, but is probably where the amoebas breed! The fence doesn't do much to protect us, but its fun to think about what it took to weave it out of palm fronds!

This is the outside world

Notice the inspiring sign about our school (if you can't see, it says "where diversity meets inspiration") but only diversity within the social class that is allowed through this colorful guarded gate! I can hear the cars on this road beeping frantically at each other as we speak!

This is Barack Obama

This half finished portrait sits in a guard house by our school. When ever Tanzanians learn that we are American, they shout "Oh! Land of Obama!" His popularity ratings have not suffered a bit around here!

This is our walk to school

Although we often miss those 

grounding moments in the car

before and after school, both of 

our struggles with punctuality 

                are aided by the fact that we 

                                                      can hear the morning bell from 

                                                      our kitchen window, nab our 

                                                      lunches and trot across this 

                                                      soccer field to school!

So that is the inner circle of our new inhabitance, stay tuned for The Rooms in Which we Eat and Sleep and perhaps a glimpse at The World Outside These Walls!

Mr Pixie and the mini Maasai

As we become familiar with the wonders of this place we are also adjusting our views on what it takes to cope with the difficulties that accompany them.

For example, there are people selling things all over the road: sunglasses, coconuts, cassava chips etc. you don't even have to get out of your car, if you glance that way someone will just come to your window and start shoving things in and you can try them on or taste them and then decide whether or not to buy. You know how fun it is to try on sunglasses in gas stations? Well, we get to check out multiple shaded looks in our rear view mirror every time we drive somewhere! The downside is that because our skin and language betray our connection to the West, we are considered rich enough to pay top dollar for  things whether we like it or not (expensive is relative here where the annual Per Capita income is 1,400). So we're learning to haggle down prices using broken kiswahili and hand gestures. When we succeed in reducing prices we feel a bit bad for paying $3 for a pair of imitation Ray Bans, but readjust our concept of a fair standard of living when we realize that this is a big sale for someone who spends their days hawking sunglasses to the automobile-owning slice of the population from a battered styrofoam display block. When we can't get the price we want we say "Hapana asante" (no thanks) and roll the window up a bit until traffic moves on. It takes some getting used to, but its the way they roll around here!

Another blessing is the weather. It is like summer in Maine here every day, they warn us that the rains and heat will come, but for now skirts are lovely and the sun is gentle and warm. We live near the ocean and can stay in the water forever without getting cold, as it is as mild as the sweet August air. The other side of this coin is the presence of a nasty population of mosquitos who my classroom assistant tells me are escapees from a local medical experimentation lab. They hover under tables, around screen doors and in my students' backpacks as they hang innocently outside of our classroom. As soon as the sun goes down they get hungry. Of course, the lovely weather tempts you to wear shorts or skirts when you begin a journey and then when the sun goes down you're hopping from leg to leg trying to multitask your thoughts and conversations with relentless itchy stinging on any exposed skin. Of course, I arrived with my mind made up that I wouldn't need to spray chemical bug spray all over my skin and that I'd sleep with a mosquito net and take precautions when I travel out of the city, but that I could take these urban mosquitos never mind the overreactive hype of less-tough individuals in my privileged community. Tanzanians aren't drenched in "Off" as they mill about the streets, why should I be?! Zak was of the same camp when we went out to a staff happy hour with him in shorts and me in a skirt and boots, he's lucky he has leg hair and now I wear bug spray.

So that's enough of tainting the dream with reality, let's get down to the purely good stuff! 

I've figured out how to cook sustainable meals even though I'm inventing what to do with ingredients that are mostly labeled in kiswahili or arabic if at all. See the picture of our first meal in our home together, curried somethings, rice, apples and peanutbutter and local beer. I cook for five people, I eat 1 portion, Zak eats 2, then we pack 2 for lunch the next day!

The beaches are incredible, we visited one with some new friends from school a few weekends ago and I found the best seashells of my life! You take a ferry there to cross a crook in the peninsula and once again you can buy chips and sunglasses while sitting in your car on the ferry, you can also look around at the people packed in along side of you. Seeing babies slung on backs Zak and I had a good chat about the differences in developmental stimulation received by babies who are carried around as parents/supervising siblings do other things vs babies who are given more time to interact with their environment. Trying to empathize with women in burkas we tried to think about what it might feel like to be the child of someone who is all eyes and cloth. People are accomplishing incredible feats of balance with bicycles loaded with mattresses, baskets of fruit and stacks of wood or with buckets of fish, overstuffed parcels, even a pumpkin on their heads! Once across the water we're in a very different community, Dar es Salaam is a city (although it is more bustling markets and foot traffic than high rises) with distance you see more open land, mud huts, half-built cement block houses, grazing cows...then you're on these striking beaches. There is one that is full of vendors and radios, a bustling party beach (we haven't yet been there) or you can go to the secluded areas where its nothing but you and some baobab trees (and in our case a cheeky monkey and a huge dead jellyfish).

This weekend Zak and I headed back in that direction without our friends to guide us. We drove past little pyramids of tomatoes and pineapples on strings for sale along the road, a cluster of children kicking a soccer ball into a stick and twine goal, men laying mortar on one of the many unfinished cement block houses, a man in his sunday clothes looking towards the sea with his hands on his hips, two women in head scarves laughing happily and strolling in rubber flip flops along the dusty road and a long expanse of sandy palm-treed emptiness until we came to a little sign that said "horse club." This was a sight for sore eyes because as much as we're loving our adventure and adapting quite nicely considering the circumstances, we had both been feeling quite trapped in the world of migrating from our apartment to school and back again all week long. We needed to be freed and who else could do such a thing than the horse club! So we followed the sign down a road of pure sand (thank god for our Escudo with two kinds of 4 wheel drive!) The whole time we lived with the awareness that we were most likely not going to find anything like a horse club out in the bush, but decided to enjoy the journey nonetheless. Eventually we were pleasantly shocked to be welcomed into a little gated wonderland in the middle of nowhere by a kind and twinkly german woman named Josephine. She had a tuft of wooly hair pulled across her head and a glaring sunburn leathering her matronly chest. She showed us the Jungle Lolo,

her fuscia bouganvilla,

her pack of german shepherds, and finally her horses. She is trying to make the perfect breed of horse to live in Tanzania. She seems to be the only one doing it because she said she has to import their food from all over the place get a vet from Kenya, but she's part gypsy so horses are in her blood and she's got quite a large family of them! A young girl named Ana who has come from abroad to stay on the farm for the summer (she responded to an ad the paper, what a bold move!) brought us Mr Pixie and Andy, two big chestnut horses. They each got a big nip off a burly carrot and then we hopped on their backs, I got Andy and Zak got- that's right Mr Pixie! Ana lead us on her horse to a sticked-in practice ring, we each had one Tanzanian man accompanying us on foot in case our horses got out of hand. We practiced one time each the skills of stop, go and turn and then we were off towards the beach! We spent a whole hour just meandering this heavenly expanse of beach on the backs of horses! The waves rolled in, our horses rocked us with their gate and we just kept looking at each other with that "can you believe this?!" smile. We really could have been in a dream. There was no one on the beach except for a few local guys who joked with our escorts and some coy teenaged girls splashing topless in the sea. Andy and Mr Pixie liked walking right along the surf and once Mr Pixie tried to go in and my helper had to fetch us out because he wasn't responding to left, right or stop! Ana said that she takes them riding in the sea bareback! After bidding farewell to our new found friends, vowing to return so that we could learn to gallop (Zak was itching to go faster!) and pinching ourselves to make sure that this was our lives, we returned to the beach for a few hours to swim, read, run, conspire and be grateful. When finally headed home we were singing!

So those are my thoughts and adventures from the in between, if you want to know about the mini Maasai or the rest of the week at school, check out our classroom blog and hear straight from the experts!
http://istgrade2.wordpress.com/

First days

I have been in Dar es Salaam for ten days and teaching for three, therefore I am a sponge without much conclusive analysis, but want to start the sharing before it gets more unmanageable than it already is! I spent 35 hours in transit, eating international airplane food and reading a great book from Opera's list "Say You're One of Them"by Uwem Akpan, stories of trial and resiliency in children from several African countries. My imagination latched onto the dusty roads, smoky food and barefoot children. I felt the limitations of my perception of Africa; common knowledge about this place is deeply simplified and stereotyped. I said many times that  I was "moving to Africa", but it is Tanzania that I come to, Dar es Salaam, my neighborhood, not the entire continent, that is a much larger being to come to know, if it is even possible.
This journey to know a new place is quite complicated. Not only do your senses need to adjust to new shapes, colors and smells, but the very foundation of knowledge that you base your assumptions on for what is safe and what is friendly, what success means and how time is spent is new. Its like language, you are not simply learning new words for the same old things, greetings have different weight for different people in each moment, the reception of a single question can vary by region, the notion of love has vast interpretations as well as a menagerie of methods for communication.
But I am here in it doing my best to learn and see- we are here. Zak and I are making a home with a crazy quilt and a mosquito net, a gas stove and an in-shower water heater, a falling over refrigerator and makeshift laundry lines in the corners. Our walls are white and our furniture heavy brown wood. Things are simple but of good quality, cheap has a different meaning here. I feel like cheap means simple and not needing to be replaced often, whereas I am used to cheap meaning flimsy and tossable (though there is no shortage of that sort of cheap at the road side stalls or in the hands of the people who knock on your windows when you're driving). We're having a grand old time trying to figure out how to keep the floors clean and our tummies full without the usual Aiya (spelling?) to do it for us. We wake up each morning in the dark and though we're a bit groggy for a few moments, we are so happy to see each other. We wander through a busy street, wade through a new language, study people in staff meetings and at fruit stalls and then put our heads together to try to make sense of it all. This blessing is the Red Thread, the steady line that runs through the story as all else changes. We get to catch a glimpse of each other walking our lines to lunch, vent frustrations at the homework policy or the unwieldy mess left in our closets by a previous teacher,  and overflow with the excitement of successes and unique noticings from the day. What a trip to be each other's closest friends, constant companions, truest loves and to get to see each other in the staff lounge!
We are each delighted by our classes, our students have seen so much of the world, are hungry to learn and are unabashed in their response to our theatrical classroom shenanigans. During morning meeting we sing to the ukulele each day, they chase my imagination with wide eyes as I lay out an idea through a story then pick up where I left off, asking when all is said and done if they can write or read more on the topic! I'm not saying that they don't have their struggles, managing many languages, many transitions, unusual attachments due to multiple moves, wide cultural differences, and a life sheltered within a vibrant but very distinct culture. Though the origins of my students range from Tanzania, to California, Bolivia to Pakistan, many of them have lived in multiple countries and can't quite answer the question "where are you from? " There is a strong push to make a home in the school community that can soothe the confusing edges of roots spread so wide.
In my math curriculum yesterday I was supposed to teach money, of course the objective and manipulatives were geared towards American money, in the states that's kindergarten work. But many of my kids didn't know which one is a penny or a nickel, and why should they? We went through with the objective and practiced identifying and counting and the like, but for homework I decided that they should bring in money from their countries. Everyone came in clutching little envelopes full of coins and we exploded from there. We ended up with a coin museum (see pics), we researched and presented values, did rubbings of pictures, felt shape and weight and celebrated a truly 'global economy.' Tomorrow the other second grades and Zak's class will come in and see our spontaneous World Coins Museum!! Since I'm now behind on the curricular objectives for taking the time to do this we probably won't go into comparing values and making economic judgements, but the possibilities are endless and it was so fun and rewarding for us all to take what the world says we should know and carry it to an authentic place. I am learning so much about the limitations of assumptions because the experience of the people that I'm sharing my days with are so varied.
Well, gotta take the underwear off the back of the couch, 'cause we're having guests tomorrow! (we have to hang clothes inside or Mango Flies will lay their flesh burrowing larvae in them. What an adventure!

Thanks for reading, love to you all!!