Thread: The Switch (some language)

Her name means Happiness. I look it up on the guesthouse computer, because everyone's name in Tanzania means something and I want to know what hers means. When I find it (Furaha: Happiness), I choke on a laugh and call Max over from across the compound.

"Yeah right. She gets high off being angry!"

"I know!"

"Look up the Swahili for Child Abuser."

"It's not that bad!"

"Okay, then. Look up the Swahili for Bitch."

We lean over the computer, and it bleaches our skin bluer and lighter than it is already.

"Kuma Mamako. Miss Kuma Mamako!"

"God, she's a kuma mamako," Max says, before patting me on the shoulder and going to shower.

***

The first day, the children wore wrinkled and dirty red cotton uniforms. The boys wore button-down shirts and shorts that exposed their dry, dusty knees. The girls wore dresses with white smocks. They ran, flying along with the van, leaping over potholes and chickens and tires. Some tried to stick their fingers in the window, but our driver Joseph scolded them. "Mzungu! Mzungu!" White person! White person!

"Wazungu!" White people!

"Teachah! Teachah!"

"Hello, how are you I am fine!"

"Hello! How old are you I am six!"

"Mzungu!"

I smiled and I sweated and I shrunk back into my seat. I felt like a Beatle. I stuck a hand out the window and it was high-fived by a little girl with her hair in cornrows finished with white beads.

"Mzungu! Mambo vipi mzungu? Good morning, good evening, I am fine!"

Max looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Sweat was pooling above his lip, beading on his stubble.

"So I guess they noticed we're white?" he said, shrugging. I laughed and he laughed and I was grateful we were volunteer partners.

"Here we are," Joseph said, stopping the van. The building was cinderblock and had a tin roof and it was painted sky blue and forest green.

"So do we just go in?" I asked him.

"Yes. Kwaheri!"

Kids instantly seized my hands, three on my right and two on my left and they pulled me toward the school. I looked behind me and they were doing the same thing to Max. I asked them their names, and they looked up at me with wide eyes and they responded in high-pitched voices, fast and layered on top of each other. I missed each and every name. I was smiling so much my face hurt, a deep aching in the cheeks, and I was scared, so scared. I wanted to get under one of the little wooden desks and fold in on myself like a snail. A slug in a shell; a girl in a desk.

***

Furaha was nice the first day. She called us by our names. She shook our hands (slack grip, her fingertips tickled my wrist) wrote our names on the board. Her handwriting looked different, more European than ours, with extra curlicues and tails. Danica. Max.

"Class!" she shouted. The kids sat up straight, heads hovering above their thin bodies like balloons. "These are your new teachers! Mister Max and Miss Danica. Say hello."

"Hello!"

"Say Hello Mister Max."

"Hello Meestah Max!"

"Say Hello Miss Danica!"

"Hello Mees Danna!"

I could feel sweat behind my knees and it unfurled down my calf. The kids were looking at me like I was a talisman, like I was enchanted, like I was a goddess.

Furaha led the kids through the national anthem and a welcome song. They sang with their chins up and their heads back, like hungry baby birds.

"Okay," Furaha said to Max and me, "Now you teach."

***

We don't make lesson plans, not really. We mean to, start each day with good intentions, but we get lost in the day, our brains melting in our skulls. We nap and we hang out with the other volunteers and drink Tusker beers under the awning of Deo's shop. We play cards (Go Fish, Bullshit, Gin Rummy, a game called Golf) and we read books. We buy textiles. We eat fried bread and then when we get full we sit around for an hour or so and then we eat more fried bread. But some nights we feel responsible and so we sit at the plastic dining tables and actually try to draft a lesson plan.

"Should we teach them letters again?" I ask.

"Yeah, sure, we did math today, right? I don't even remember."

"Yeah, I think so? I don't remember either! Wait, yeah, we did math because remember? Iddi got 2+3=5?"

"Yes!"

"Okay, so letters."

"Want to just do the whole `A-is-for-Apple' thing again?"

"Sure."

We teach addition and subtraction and A-is-for-Apple. Sometimes we teach complete English vocabulary using cliched African animals.

"And the English word for Tembo is? Elephant! Say `Elephant!'"

***

After the first day, Furaha has a switch. I think that's what they call them, sticks for hitting people. I picture southerners with thick accents calling it a switch, like "Oh, Papa's gonna get me with his switch." So, she has this stick, and it's sharp and pointed and it makes this twang! when she snaps it against the desk. She peels back the barky outer skin so it's ripe and green and splintery. I look at Max like why does she have that? And he looks back like you idiot, it's to hit the kids with.

Furaha has a switch and she no longer calls us by our names. She calls us Mr. and Miss. Mzungu. Mr. and Miss. White Person. She sits at the teacher's desk in the front of the room and she laughs when we make mistakes, and she is just omnipresent, breathing down our necks and laughing her high, meaty laugh. She turns to the boys in the front row (Musa, Juma, Alhamidi) and gestures to us and says something in Swahili. The boys laugh and say ndiyo, yes.

We see Furaha use the switch for the first time when Aisha gets a math problem wrong. 1+3 does not equal 5. So Furaha calmly asks Aisha for her hand and then she snaps the switch against it one, two, three, four times. 1+3=4.

***

One day, Max is sick. It is just me and Furaha and the class. At recess, Furaha waves me over. She claps her hand at me and invites me to her house for lunch. I look at her hands, at her rusty red fingernails and the henna designs crawling up her dark arms like vines. I am cautious to follow Miss Kuma Mamako, but I do it anyway, to be polite. Her house is down a muddy alley behind the school. The houses are made of packed mud with glassless windows and newspaper curtains. Furaha walks a few steps ahead of me and she occasionally looks back over her shoulder and smirk at me, like I amuse her and she is a little embarrassed to be seen with me. Her mouth turns up at the corner and looks like a comma turned on its side. My skirt drags against the mud, and my shoes get sucked deeper, but I chase Furaha past cooking stalls and window fronts selling flour and laundry detergent.

"Here. We are here. Karibu." Welcome. She peels back her fabric door (a kanga catching the wind, billowing out like the skirt of a dervish). It is dark and wet and warm inside, and I can't see anything and it smells like soil, like making mud pies in the summer.

My eyes start to adjust, black giving way to a veil of neon green, and then I see the room. It is tiny and she has a small couch against the far wall and a shelf with a few Arabic and Swahili books. She has a white plastic table (the kind North Americans keep on their back porches) covered in a torn swath of fabric and a radio with a peeling strip of duct tape holding the batteries in.

"Sit," says Furaha, gesturing toward the couch. I feel like one of our students, looking up into her round eyes and following her commands. She picks up a thermos of sweet chai and fills two dirty white plastic cups. She hands one to me, and as I reach for it my fingertip brushes her nail.

"Asante."

"You're welcome."

Furaha keeps looking at me, she looks at my face for a while. It scares me, the way she is looking at me. Furaha does everything with intensity. Even in her silence, she is loud. I can't look at her anymore, so I look away, to the dirt floor. She looks down too, and she swallows.

"How old are you?" She asks me.

"Eighteen," I respond, and I know that that is both old and young, and above all, I know that it is inadequate. I want to ask Furaha how old she is. The first day I respectfully said "shikamoo" to her and she laughed and told me she is too young for that.

"I am twenty-two," she says, "ishirini na mbili. You are kumi na nane." She stares at me, right in the eye, and I feel like she is tying a net around me. Her gaze is sharp and strong and when I can't stand her looking at me anymore, she laughs.

"You are very funny." She says. My mouth falls open, and I quickly close it.

"I'm not funny!"

"Funny is not a bad thing, mzungu."

"But I think you mean it as a bad thing."

"I do not. You are funny."

"Okay."

"Are you hungry?" Furaha asks, standing and walking toward a plastic container of mandazi.

"Oh no, it's okay."

"No, you are hungry." Furaha places two mandazi on a torn page of newspaper. The headline is something about dead babies found behind a hospital in Dar Es Salaam. I show her.

"Oh, I do not read it," says Furhaha, "I just use that newspaper to eat mandazi off of. Babies die! How is that news?"

"I guess so."

"You like mandazi?"

"Yes! At home we have something like them called doughnuts. Police officers eat them."

"Police officers eat mandazi too." We chew our fried bread. Furaha softens somehow in her own house. I can hear her saliva as she chews, and she becomes smaller, she becomes someone I could know.

"What made you become a teacher?"

"I wanted to have money. It is the only thing I can do." She smacks her palms together, dispersing mandazi crumbs into the dusty air. I nod.

"And also," she continues, "I want to not be controlled. I want no one to control me. The only way to not be controlled is money. So I have it, I make money. I am a teacher. I do not like school though. But it is important. Why are you a teacher, Miss Mzungu?"

"Why do you not call me my name?" I ask, and I regret it, I regret it fast. I want to catch it with a lizard tongue, pull it back inside me where it can rot and grow cobwebs.

"Well, you are not the first Miss Mzungu and you will not be the last. That is all. Don't get offended, Miss Mzungu."

"I am not offended."

"You are."

"Well, I want you to like me."

"I like you."

"I don't think you do."

"You are here, aren't you? I do not bring the other Misses Mzungu here. But you do not answer my question. Why are you a teacher?"

"Well, I'm not," I say, "I'm just a volunteer."

"But you're teaching. You teach more than I teach."

"I guess I came because I wanted to help," I say, and I look up at her and this time her eyes don't scare me. She looks down, and her eyelashes exhale across her cheekbones. She looks up at me and she looks sad, and like she pities me. She opens her mouth to say something, but then she closes it again. Her eyes are a little scared, and they thank me for coming and they say That's Enough.

***

I come home that day and Max is lying in bed, his face slick and tinged a wet seafoam green.

"You don't look good," I say, tapping his knee.

"Well I feel like shit," he says, laughing a little.

"Did Joseph take you to the hospital?" I ask.

"Yeah, they said I have an amoeba? I was sort of like ew, that's really gross, but then I figured it's a pretty cool story to tell. Like when people ask What did you get in Tanzania? I can say, An amoeba!"

"Like a battle scar?"

"Exactly. But it was pretty gnarly, they had me shit in a tiny container, and I was really worried I'd shit-"

"Ew, Max, that's enough."

"How was school?"

"It was good. I had lunch with Miss Furaha."

"Oh god! How was it? Did she whip you with her switch?"

"Oh come on, no! It was nice, actually. We went to her house. She wasn't as scary as I thought."

"Are you getting soft on me?"

"I'm not getting soft! If anything, I'm getting hard. And why waste all that time hating her? We took her job, Max!"

"Who cares, she gets paid. If someone came into my work and did my job while all I had to do is sit and watch, well I'd be pretty happy about it."

***

Max misses school for a week.

***

The second day he is absent we teach body parts. Furaha speaks Swahili, translates my English dialogue. Then I point to each bit of anatomy - Elbow, Knee, Neck, Foot - and pronounce it for the children in English. Furaha slaps the blackboard with her switch, and the kids sit up with straight backs and call back the English in little animal voices. We go to Furaha's house during recess, and I bring milk for her chai. She thanks me, and then she gives it all to me. I say No, that's not what I wanted, it is for you, and she shakes her head and hands me my cup.

***

The third day we sing songs in the morning, and Furaha has me teach the kids songs in English. On the spot, I cannot remember any songs, suddenly I have never before heard any songs. And then I remember, all those little expectant brown faces staring at me, I remember The Itsy Bitsy Spider. I start to sing it, to teach it to them, and then the kids are singing too. They already know it. I don't remember teaching them, and I don't remember Max teaching them, and then I hear Furaha: You are not the first Miss Mzungu and you will not be the last. I keep singing, keeping my head up like the kids that first day, and I feel hollow and very not special. My father used to hold my chin and look me square in the eye and tell me I am special, tell me I will do big things, one day. I am not special, but I finish singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider, and so do the children, for they know it as well as I do.

At recess, Furaha buys hot, oily mandazi, and I buy her a chocolate bar and we eat them sitting on the teacher's desk at the front of the classroom. We cross our legs Indian-style and she asks me if I want to be a teacher when I am older. I already feel pretty old, but I also feel like I should be wearing a red uniform and learning to sing songs.

"I'm not sure," I say, chewing.

"Don't do it."

"Why?"

"It is hard. I am a teacher and I act like a parent and then you wazungu come and I am your teacher and your parent and it is just not very nice."

"Do something else," I offer.

"I can't do anything else. I am very lucky to be this. I love it."

"But you just told me not to do it."

"Yes. You are a mzungu, Danica. You can be many things."

***

The third day, we review body parts, and then we draw pictures of our houses. Furaha draws hers on the board in colored sidewalk chalk, and I notice that she adds a solid wooden door, instead of the kanga that blows in the wind. The kids draw theirs, with their family lined up outside, all spindly legs and no necks.

"Yo' house, Mees Danna?" asks one of the little girls, Maua.

"Yo' house! Yo' house!" the children chant until Miss Furaha snaps the switch against a desk at the front of the room.

"Go ahead and draw your house, Miss Danica," Furaha says, handing me the sidewalk chalk. She says my name. Her eyes are a dare. I take the chalk, and I draw a lie.

My father recently built a new wing on our house. He added a second guest room and a cinema where he does screenings of documentaries on clean water and the shrinking habitat of polar bears in the arctic. I cut off the new wing. I draw grass where the swimming pool is. I slice the top floor off, and I picture my bedroom with its vintage white vanity collapsing and blowing away. I draw a neat rectangle with a pointed roof, two square windows and one door. I draw a tree next to it, with a cloudlike mass of leaves on top. I draw my mother, and my father, and me, all holding hands out front.

Furaha smiles at me.

"Ooh! Pendeza!" says Maua.

"Yes, teachah, pendeza!"

"Pendeza in English?" shouts Furhaha. There is silence.

"Dog?" asks Iddi.

"Dog?" Furhaha mimics, indignant. "Not dog!"

"Not dog?" asks Iddi.

"Iddi, sema pendeza ni kiingereza," Iddi, say pendeza in English. Iddi shakes a little, and he starts to smile awkwardly, showing the rotting bits on his two front teeth. He sticks his finger in his mouth and he looks at me, and his eyes are almost crying already. He does not look at Furaha, he looks just at me.

"Iddi! Sema!" Iddi! Say something!

"Boy? Cat? Dog?"

Furaha is across the room and Iddi is still looking at me, but then his eyes are closed and Furaha's stick is coming down hard on his back, and the sound bites my ears and Iddi starts to cry, a wailing like a small baby. Some kids laugh, holding their small hands over their mouths, and then Furaha is laughing too. Laughing hard, and tears are tumbling down her face and they are tumbling down Iddi's face too and still the switch comes down and gnashes at his back.

I hear something, over the crying and the laughter, and I turn to Maua, who has her eyes closed tight and she is saying,

"Beautiful. Pendeza ni beautiful. Beautiful! It is beautiful!"

Then I am across the room like Furaha was, and I am holding Iddi like a baby, and his head rests in the crook of my neck. I push my way through the desks, Iddi's dusty black shoes banging against the wood. Furaha laughs more, and I turn and I look at her and she is laughing and there are tears down to her chin and she looks at me and says, "GO."

***

The fourth day, Furaha does not come. Joseph drops me in front of the school, and it is just me and the children. I teach them math. They call it Arithmetic, so I do too.

"Today, we are going to learn arithmetic!"

They look at me, and then one boy, Musa stands on his desk and shouts something. Then the kids laugh and they all start shouting. Musa sings something, and then they are all singing and standing on their desks, spinning like they are in a centrifuge, and I am left standing still.

"Quiet." I say, knocking my knuckles on the blackboard. It is still loud.

"Quiet!" I shout, like Furaha. Some of the girls sit with their hands folded in their laps, but the classroom has devolved into something chaotic, and I feel my eyes needle at the corners.

"Kimya! Quiet!" I shout louder, and it is quiet for a moment. "Kaa!" Sit! Some sit, but half are still dancing and whooping. Juma, a short boy with a freshly shaved head jumps from one desk to the other. This looks fun, so a few others follow suit.

"Kaa!" I shout again, and Juma sits neatly on the cement floor. I want to tell him to sit in his seat but I don't know how. "Kaa in seat!" I yell.

Another boy jumps, a boy whose name I don't know. I am ready to yell again, but then he misses. He misses the desk he is jumping to, and he snaps his mouth against the rubbed wood. He is bleeding and it is pooling on the cement, a Rorschach test in crimson. He is screaming, a primal screaming that rouses mothers from their sleep, that stings something inside, something I don't know the name for. I pick up the nameless boy, and I hitch him up against my hip. He is screaming in my ear, strings of pink saliva stretched taught between his teeth. I don't know where to go, but I do know where to go. I run to Furaha's house. The boy whose name I do not know, his blood is saturating the shoulder of my blouse, and I try to run as gently as I can around turkeys and cooking fires.

Furaha's house looks like the one on the chalkboard yesterday, and I bang on the wood next to the not-door.

"Furaha!"

"Kwa?" She asks, ripping back the kanga. What?

"Help, Furaha, I need you!"

"You don't need me. You know what to do, right, Miss Mzungu?"

"Just help me, Furaha."

She lines her couch in greasy newspaper and lays the nameless boy on it.

"I am not a doctor," she says, turning around to look me in the eye.

"I know," I say.

"Then why do you bring him here?"

"You're the only one I know."

"You know other people."

"I trust you."

"You don't like me, Miss Mzungu."

"I trust you," I repeat.

***

Furaha peels back the boy's lower lip. She wipes it with a damp cloth, and she laughs. Always laughing.

"The boy is fine," she says, "come closer." I come closer, and the boy is looking back and forth between us with wide eyes. I look in his mouth, and Furaha points to a small cut. It is bleeding, but she has wiped the blood away. The boy's teeth are unscathed, and the cut is shallow. I look at Furaha.

"Thank you."

"What for? I didn't do anything."

"Just thank you, for helping me."

"It is not my pleasure, but you are welcome." Furaha says, smiling a little. I laugh. I sit on her floor against the couch.

"I thought I broke him."

"Broke what?"

"Broke him," I say.

***

It is Easter and there is no school on Friday or Monday. We do not celebrate Jesus' resurrection. We go to the Serengeti, Max and me and some other volunteers. We are glad there is no school and we are glad Max has no more amoeba, and on Easter we are glad as we are supposed to be. We see giraffes and we see a baby elephant with its feet like kettleballs and we sit around a fire in the savannah and tell stories of white people eaten for dinner by lions. If not lions, then hyenas.

***

After Easter Max comes back and Furaha and I do not know how to act. With him or with each other. We go back to the way we are, and she doesn't say my name anymore. We are Mister and Miss Mzungu, Max and I are. Max does the math lessons and I do the English ones. Furaha sits at the teacher's desk and strokes her switch.

Furaha stops coming back after recess. She takes her tea at home and she does not invite me and she does not invite Max, so we play with the children outside. I lean against the blue cinderblock wall, under the six inches of shade afforded by overhang of the roof. Max plays soccer with the kids, and little Musa hangs from his cargo shorts trying to get the ball from him. Max is sweaty, and his shirt drapes over him like it is made of liquid, frozen in the moment of pouring. I am coughing on dust, and when I open my mouth it plastered to my teeth, so I wipe the grit against the inside of my upper lip. The girls are tugging at my ponytail, so I release it - - Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! - and let Maua and Aisha braid it with their slippery fingers. It does not become a braid, but rather a massive oblong tangle. I shake them off once I realize the extent of the damage and they laugh.

"Beautiful," Maua says decisively, slipping her hand into mine.

That afternoon we let the children color. Max is hot and I am hot and we do not have it in us to teach. No arithmetic and no letters, no elephants and no lions. Just coloring.

Iddi asks us what they are supposed to be coloring, and it takes a few tries for Max and me to understand. I feel guilty, not even speaking their language but being left in charge of their education.

"Anything," I say. I do not know the word in Swahili, so I look it up in my phrasebook. "Chochote."

Max sits down at the teacher's desk and says,

"Only an hour to the van."

The kids color for a half hour and then they get restless. They start to kick the chair of the child in front of them and Musa begins to lead the class in song again, like the day the nameless boy fell. Max looks up through heavily lidded eyes and shushes them.

"Angalia," says Juma. Look. And he stands from his desk. He looks at me; he looks me in the eye just the way Furaha does. Like he is daring me. He walks carefully (like he is on a tightrope, one foot aligned with the other) to the teacher's desk, and he smacks his hand on it - slap - and runs back to his desk. He sits quietly. I glare at him.

"Kaa." Sit.

"I am sit." He says, in English. I shake my head.

"Stay sitting, or you will stand in the corner." Juma looks at me. He stands. He walks toward the teacher's desk. I lift him by the wrist and plant him in the corner, facing the wall.

"Stay." I say.

Juma sticks his tongue out at me. He shakes his backside for the students, like a hula dancer, wagging it and making them laugh.

"Juma!" I shout.

"Calm down," says Max, "he's just having fun."

"But he isn't listening to me!"

"He's just a kid."

"He isn't like this with Furaha!"

"I wonder why," Max says, snorting.

Juma pinches me, just a little pinch, a playground pinch, a pinch-me-so-I-can-believe-this-is-real-pinch. I grab Juma's wrist and he looks up at me, his eyes alert and awake and scared. I don't look at Max first. I just slap Juma.

I slap him once, on the forearm, and it makes a sound that bounces around the walls of the room like a song, and it stings my hand and Juma rips his arm from my hand and rubs it quickly, making a shh shh shh sound.

"What did you do?" Max asks, jumping up.

"He pinched me!" I say, flushing. I feel my chest marbleize red and I look at the ground.

"But you hit him!"

"Furaha does it!"

"You don't want to be Furaha, Dan!" He says, grabbing my shoulders.

"I do." I say, "she can control them!"

"Look, Danica," Max points at Juma who has jumped onto Maua's desk and is sticking his tongue out at me, "You aren't Furaha. You can't scare him."

I rub my hand.

"What?" Max asks.

"My hand hurts," I say, "I hurt myself."