The Magnificent Beast

One of the advantages of having no set itinerary is that I get to do a variety of different tasks, depending upon what is happening in the classrooms or how I feel or, more often than not, simply identifying what needs to be done. It goes without saying that each day is different. In fact, I have been doing so many things this week that I feel like a milk-giving, cart-pulling, egg-laying, wool-bearing sow.

So far this week I have:

• demonstrated the difference between physical and chemical changes in chemistry class;
• attended physics class to help the girls if they had questions about determining relative density (thankfully, they did not have any questions);


• taught an introductory English lesson on poetry in which I read a number of poems by East African authors;
• spent four hours cleaning up the orphanage's computer, in the process boosting available memory from 4.9 KB to 835 KB, and perfoming maintenance tasks that had not been done in the past year-and-a-half;
• created four reading exercises and corresponding answer keys for some of the books I purchased on Friday;
• washed the blackboards in the three class rooms (another task that does not appear to have been done in ages).

Of the tasks, the poetry class was the most fun and cleaning the blackboards was the hardest. One nice thing about conducting the poetry class is that I was able to become familiar with some absolutely beautiful poems by local poets. If you are into poetry, try to get your hands on any of the following:

• Building the Nation, Henry Barlow
• The Crack, Sheika A. El-Miskery
• Just a Word, Sheika A. El-Miskery
• Kisenyi, John Butler
• Slum Day, Jim Chaplin
• Poem in Four Parts, William Kamera
• Blind, Joseph Kariuki
• The Splash, Yusuf O. Kassam
• The Crucified Thief, John S. Mbiti
• The Town Beauty, Magemeso Namungalu
• The Woman I Married, Edwin Waiyaki
• Kimbe Mines, Timothy Wangusa
• Wild Horse of Serengeti, B. Tejani