08/06/11

On my morning run a passed a group of kids in walking toward school in their uniforms. A couple of the boys were incredibly rude and disrespectful, yelling out “mulungu” at me repeatedly and yelling all sorts of other things in Xopi in a jeering manner. When people do stuff like this or call me mulungu, it’s pretty annoying and frustrating—how long do I have to live here and how much more public of a position do I need to have in your community for you to recognize me and see me as a part of your community? But for students in the school where I am a teacher, this is flat-out unacceptable. So I ran past them going out and coming back and pretended I didn’t hear them, just smiling and saying good morning. And then I got back to the gate of the school I stopped to wait for them. My director was coincidentally already there so I told her, “how wonderful, I am waiting for three very rude boys who I was going to bring to you anyway to be disciplined, and you’re already here!” So I waited for them. When I finally saw them coming they didn’t cross the street to come into the gate and I realized that they weren’t students at my school, but at Erin’s (and they were going to arrive at their school at least a full hour late). “SHOOT! If I had known they weren’t students here I would have just hit them when I ran past them!” My director laughed and said “even if they were students here, you should have just hit them—BAP, BAP, BAP—and I bet they never would have done it again!”