Alexandria of Africa (12 page)

The truck ground to a stop and I lifted my head from my hands. Everybody got up and started toward the ladder to climb down.

Sarah knelt down in front of me. “Are you feeling better?”

“A little.” How embarrassing. I’d almost lost my breakfast on this trip. I’d never been carsick before in my life, but this wasn’t a car, and this wasn’t a road, either.

“It is pretty rough back here,” Sarah offered.

“How could a few miles take so long?” I groaned.

“It was just under an hour. Come on, you’ll feel better when you get your feet on the ground.”

She took me by the hand and led me down the now
empty aisle. Everybody else had already gotten off. She climbed down the ladder and I followed. Nebala offered me his hand for the last two steps and I accepted. He flashed me the Vulcan greeting and walked off.

“What was that?” Sarah asked.

“Must be some Maasai thing,” I offered.

We rounded the truck and joined the group. They were clustered around Renée and a couple of guys who looked like workmen. I looked past them, trying to survey the whole scene. There were a dozen little buildings arranged around the property. A couple of the buildings were made of concrete blocks, topped with identical red tin roofs, with blue window frames and doors. They were cute in a dollhouse sort of way. The rest of the buildings weren’t quite so cute. The roofs were rusty and they seemed to be constructed of mud.

In the distance was a large field with a couple of semi-matching soccer nets made of tree branches at each end, and off to the side were two rusty poles with basketball hoops attached. The whole area was a combination of burnt brown grass and red dirt. It certainly had less in common with the playing fields at my school than it did with the moon.

I heard children’s voices and looked around. I could hear them but I couldn’t see them. They had to be inside the buildings. Then I saw a face. A little tiny black face was peeking out of one of the windows. It was joined by a second and then a third face, and then a little hand waved at me. I waved back, and the little faces burst into laughter and disappeared from view.

“Okay, everybody, you all know what to do!” Renée announced. “Let’s get to work!”

The group scattered. Apparently they all knew their
jobs. I would have paid more attention, but I already knew mine—my job was to avoid doing
any
job.

“Um … Renée,” I called out. “I noticed that everybody is putting on their gloves, and I realized that I didn’t bring any gloves. I was wondering if—”

She whipped a pair of gloves out of her back pocket and handed them to me. Without saying a word she walked away.

Wearing work gloves and actually working turned out to be not entirely the same thing. So far I’d managed to avoid all physical labour. In some ways, it had been almost as hard as the labour itself, but at least I wasn’t going to end up all sweaty. I tried my best to avoid Renée, and that helped, but, as in fashion, the key to everything was in the accessories. I always had a shovel or a trowel in my hands. And when I walked, I walked with purpose. Maybe the only purpose was to get away from one place where there was work to another with less work, but if you were moving quickly people naturally figured you had some place to go and something to do when you got there.

My lack of effort didn’t seem to be hindering the building process. The rest of the people were practically knocking themselves out. I almost got the feeling there was an unannounced contest between the church kids and the non-church kids to see who could do the most. I was
content to be the referee. As far as I was concerned, the person who won this particular contest was the one who did the least work, and I was in first place with nobody else even in sight in my rear-view mirror.

“Alexandria, can I talk to you?” Renée asked.

“I’m sort of busy,” I said. To illustrate the point I dug my trusty shovel into the pile of sand and actually put a shovelful into the wheelbarrow. So much for my shutout.

“I think we should talk, now.”

Time for the backup plan. “Could I go to the bathroom first? … I really have to go … badly … Can you tell me where it is?”

She looked as if she wasn’t going to tell me. Then, “Over there, the little building by the fence.”

I looked in the direction she was pointing. That couldn’t be a bathroom. It was just some little shack-like building … oh, no.

“It’s an outhouse, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Ever used an outhouse before?”

“Once, at a cottage.”

“So you’ve never used the bathrooms here at the school before, right?”

I shook my head.

“Then our conversation can definitely wait. Come, let me escort you.”

“I think I can go to the bathroom by myself. I’ve been toilet-trained for a long time.”

“I’m sure you have, but I’ll walk you over there anyway. I doubt if you’ve been trained with these toilets.”

I didn’t know what
that
was supposed to mean, but she seemed pretty amused by it. What was so funny about me going to the bathroom?

“We’ll talk when you’re through,” she told me.

I walked off toward the bathroom and didn’t turn around, but I could hear her footsteps not far behind. I really didn’t like this escort, mainly because the whole idea behind going to the bathroom was to distract her so we wouldn’t have a conversation. Now she’d be right outside, waiting for me for me to come out. That wouldn’t work … unless I just didn’t come out. I could just sit there and wait, tell her I wasn’t feeling well, and sit in there for an hour, or even more. It was out of the sun and I would be sitting down, and there definitely wouldn’t be any heavy lifting or mixing of cement. Maybe that was a good Plan B. Besides, come to think of it, I really did need to go.

There were two little outhouses. Two was good—I could sit in one and there’d still be another one for everybody else.

I opened up the door and the smell hit me like a transport truck. I turned slightly away. There was no way I was going to sit in there for any longer than I absolutely had to. I took a breath of fresh air into my lungs and went to step in … there was no toilet. There was just a slab of concrete on the floor and a hole in the ground in the middle of it where the toilet should have been. This had to be the boys’ toilet … like, a urinal thing.

I let the door close. Renée stood there smirking. I ignored her and pulled open the other door. It was exactly the same. Concrete, hole in the ground, no toilet.

I turned to Renée. “Where’s the girls’ bathroom?”

“You’re holding the door to it.”

“But … but there’s no toilet.”

“That hole in the middle is the only toilet you get.”

Of all the bizarre things I’d seen, heard about, or been told, this was the most bizarre. This wasn’t real. I looked at Renée closely. She looked pretty amused so did that mean she was just joking around?

“I really need to go,” I pleaded. “Really, where are the toilets?”

“Really, right there.”

“But there’s no seat … how do I sit down?”

“You don’t sit. You squat over the hole and go.”

I looked at her, and then at the hole in the ground, and then back at her. This was not believable, this was not doable! I let the door slam shut with a loud thud and backed away, as if the toilet were a hand grenade. Renée had that trademark smirk on her face. She looked as though she was really enjoying my suffering.

“I thought you wanted to use the washroom,” she said.

“I can’t do that … it’s not possible.”

“It is possible. People across most of the world do it every day.”

“It’s not possible for
me
to do. I’m not squatting like some sort of animal.”

“Are you calling these people animals?” Renée questioned.

“Of course not! It’s just that … I can’t do that, I won’t do that.”

“But I thought you had to go … 
really
bad,” she said.

“I did … I do … but I’m not going to use that hole. I’m just going to wait.”

“We won’t be back at the centre for at least four hours.”

“I can wait four days if I have to. But this isn’t what you wanted to talk to me about, is it?” Forget about going to the toilet distracting her from whatever she wanted to talk about. Now I wanted it the other way around.

“Nothing serious. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

That wasn’t what I’d been expecting her to say. I’d thought she was going to come down on me for not
working, and instead she seemed to be concerned about my welfare.

“I’m doing okay, I guess.”

“You’re probably wise to take it easy today,” she said. “I’ve noticed you’re playing it smart and not overexerting yourself.”

Was this her way of telling me, without telling me, that she’d noticed I wasn’t working very hard? Well, I wasn’t playing that game. If she wanted to tell me off, then she could just go ahead and do it.

“As you get more settled in, get to know the work that has to be done, get your sleep cycles all in sync, then we’ll expect you to work harder and harder. Not as hard as Sarah and her crew, but still a lot harder than you have today.”

She was giving me a subtle lecture about not working. Subtle wasn’t what I’d expected from her, but this was good. Subtle I could ignore.

“I think it’s important for you to meet the people you’re helping,” Renée said. “I’m going to introduce you to the children.”

“But aren’t they all in class?” I asked, motioning to the empty schoolyard.

“They are, and that’s where you’re going to meet them.”

Renée led. I followed. Familiar pattern. We stopped in front of a building. It was nothing like the one we were constructing. This one was made of wooden sticks and mud and … what was that sticking through the mud by the door?

“Watch out for the barbed wire,” Renée said.

That’s what it was! But why would there be barbed wire there? That made no sense.

“To construct the older school buildings they drove wooden poles into the ground and then wrapped barbed
wire around them to make a base,” Renée said, answering my unasked question. “Then they packed mud and cow dung around the wire.”

“Cow dung … you mean, cow poop?”

“Yes, it’s sort of the mortar in the mix.”

I shuddered. This building was being held together by cow crap. That was beyond disgusting.

Renée knocked on the open door and we walked through. I stopped, in shock, two steps in. This little room, hardly bigger than my bedroom, was filled, wall to wall, with kids. There had to be fifty or sixty of them, all packed together, three or even four together on little wooden benches behind even littler wooden desks. They looked to be about ten or eleven years old. Each was wearing an identical red woollen sweater over a white shirt or blouse and a jumper-style dress for the girls, long shorts for the boys. All of the kids, boys and girls, had close-cropped hair, almost shaved right down. They were all, without exception, smiling and staring right at me. Nervously, I smiled back, trying to hide how uncomfortable I felt.

The teacher came over and greeted Renée and then shook hands with me as well. I felt awkward. They exchanged words in that language—I’d learned it was called Swahili.

I continued to look around. The floor of the room was hard-baked red earth. The two little windows held broken panes and wire mesh, and let little air or light into the stale, dim room. There was an open textbook on each desk—one book for everybody at the desk to share—and each student was holding a little stub of a pencil overtop a small exercise book. Up above were thin wooden beams holding a rusting tin roof in place. I could see holes in the roof, places where rain would get through. I was also surprised
by what wasn’t there—there were no computers, no pictures or alphabets or decorations on the walls, no lights, no electrical outlets, no displays, no books, no nothing. It was a big, dark room with a dirt floor and walls made out of mud and cow crap, empty except for the kids who were practically piled on top of each other. And each kid, without exception, was smiling. What did they have to smile about?

Renée turned to the class and said hello to them all.
“Hamjambo!”

“Jambo!”
they all called out in response.

She turned to me. “Say who you are and say hello.”

“Um, hello … 
jambo … hamjambo,”
I said. I was pretty sure you said
“hamjambo”
when there was more than one person. I was feeling very self-conscious. “My name is Alexandria and I’m fifteen.”

“Hello!” they yelled back. A bunch of them tried to say my name but it came out garbled.

“Your name is very long,” the teacher explained.

“They could call me Alex,” I suggested. I turned back to them. “I am Alex!” I said, touching my chest.

“Hello, Alex!” a boy called out, and the rest burst into laughter.

“This is Standard Six,” Renée said. “Grade six. They’re studying math.”

I looked at the blackboard. There were long-division problems stretched from one side to the other. I remembered doing them … in about that same grade.

“Do you have any questions?” Renée asked.

I shook my head. “Not really … but there are a lot of students.”

“There are seventy-four students enrolled in Standard Six. Today there are sixty-three in attendance.”

“Thank you for your time,” Renée said, and they shook hands.

As we started to leave I looked back over my shoulder and waved. They were all smiling and waving back.

“Goodbye, Alex!” a voice called out, and everybody else laughed.

“In the last few years the government has decided that school will be free for all children from Standard One to Standard Eight,” Renée told me.

“So these kids don’t pay to come to school?” I said.

“Well, they do have to pay for uniforms, books, and other supplies.”

“That can’t be much … is it?”

“For some, it’s more than they can afford and they can’t come to school. For others, they can’t afford the time to be in school because there are things that need to be done for the family.”

“Is that why so many kids were away today?” I asked.