Birthdays and class

There were no big trips deep into Maasailand this week, unfortunately. I wouldn’t call it completely uneventful either, there was a birthday and many things happened in class of course.

As for birthdays, traditionally they didn’t celebrate those hear, but it’s coming up. The way is quite different from what I’m used to though. They take birthday quite literally - the lucky one has to be the “bebe”, the baby. There’s a father and a mother too, which are chosen on the spot. I was to be the father this week...Those parents had to feed the baby cake, which is of course a good laugh. And there’s a grandmother and –father too, they’re the ones who present the gifts. There’s plenty of dancing too, all in all they manage to make it quite a party. Though whereas in the Netherlands you may give gifts of maybe ten euro’s for instance, here I think gifts of three euro’s are considered to be expensive...

The students are doing good in class. This week they had a big exam, which got everyone pretty nervous. Rev. Ntangale, one of the students, said the morning before the exam, “No corner, no apostrophe, no abbreviation, no discussion, no anything - must be bent! (which means, ‘must be spanked’)” But the students did well.

They also had to teach themselves, about an animal of their choosing. Wherever they were lacking information they had to make it up themselves, which yielded some interesting “facts”. Apparently tigers only suck the blood from the goats they kill while not touching the meat, and there’s fish in the ocean that if not caught by people live for all of eternity and can have a million children. Also, and this actually came from our oldest student, hyenas are able to shoot poo right in your face from six miles away. I will never forget her clarify, “POOO!!!”

The students themselves love discussion the most. Often there’s a lot of "fire", it’s incredibly fun to see. Unfortunately we were very busy this week, and we only had time for a small discussion that had to end just when the fire started. It was about whether men should do housework. They managed to get to a point about the women being too tired from housework to still do anything in bed after the day, but then it was lunchtime.