Today gave me some serious empathy with teachers who spend hours in front of a classroom everyday (albeit probably doing something way more advanced than attempting basic Hebrew instruction) and sympathy for the students who sit through it. While the teaching has certainly been reaping some rewards, 40 minute periods turned into two hour stretches of Hebrew review--for some reason, the next teachers keep failing to show up--can be a bit much. The classes also start inexplicably late--there is a timetable which everyone refers to, theoretically, but when I ask one teacher why fifteen minutes have passed without class beginning they simply tell me that the bell has not yet been rung (the bell is a literal bell by the way, waved around by hand, done by whoever chooses to do it), so class hasn't begun yet. One teacher told me that it had...at which time I walked outside to see every single student still enjoying a lunch break, with teachers doing the same, and none showing any signs of migrating toward a classroom. This idea of Ugandan time (or even African time, as I've heard it referred to) is one I am quite used to from last year, but it makes it hard to create any semi-accurate schedule. I'm hoping that at least the 2 hour stretches will end--Aaron told me that I should just be sure to leave after 40 minutes, and he'd make sure another teacher would come. Fingers crossed! All in all though, I hope that my being at the primary school is helpful, and that the kids are picking up some useful vocabulary and skills.
In other, more directly rewarding news, I engaged in a fascinating interview today with a secondary school student here named Samson. Samson is Kenyan, from a small community in Ganduthi (about 100 miles north of Nairobi) who broke off from a Messianic group (who called themselves Jewish) after a visit from some Nairobi Jews and now practice as Jews.
For more on his community, check out this Tablet magazine article.
Samson gave me the history of his community and told me about how Rabbi Gershom (the rabbi of the Abayudaya community, who lives just up the hill and is going through the trial I've mentioned in a few previous posts) and a couple of other community members visited their town after hearing about their practices, and encouraged them to come live and study with the community. 8 kids from the community, including Samson, came here to study in 2005, with some leaving and others coming since. Samson also described how he and the others, which include two of his siblings, take what they learn here back with them, and hope to create a community that is similar in many ways to this one. We also got into an interesting discussion of denominations and Jewish obligations, wherein he informed me that he and his co-religionists in Kenya consider themselves "just Jews" (unlike the Jews here, who consider themselves Conservative) who want to follow the laws of Judaism "as they are commanded." Our conversation took many unexpected twists and turns, and I can't wait to transcribe it to relive again the many amazing and insightful things he said. What I probably found most fascinating was the discovery that the Abayudaya were not only building their own communal and religious identity, but that they had already become a beacon for another group over the border.
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