Week 4: 27/02/2011 ‘Shaken, not stirred’ (cultural development)

So this week, while still loving it here, we really experienced some of the negative aspects of Africa for the first time. On Thursday morning, I woke up with a dead cockroach underneath my back; it must have crawled up my mosquito net in the middle of the night before I unknowingly rolled on top of it, squishing it to death! Amy slept on an infestation of ants and I put my shoes on one day only to find that they were covered in some sort of slime. It was pretty repulsive. Also, because of the hectic week that we’ve had, I’ve been a bit under the weather and completely lost my voice. This has made trying to quieten down our class of over 60 a pretty tiresome task and I was not too impressed to find that the last of my cold medicine had been eaten through by bugs! Oh, and to top things off, my bikini was stolen! We’re taking it all with a pinch of salt though. It’s just been really interesting to note the complete change from a month ago when we screamed at the sight of ants, held each other’s hands in fear as we got a taxi with no seatbelts and vigilantly washed our teeth with only bottled water, to now, having adapted and just manned up a bit!

The biggest and most shocking thing that happened to us this week though, was that we were in the midst of Zambian riots in school on Wednesday. It was a pretty scary experience and we were fairly shaken up for quite a while afterwards. We were left in charge of over 60 children as we hid out in our classroom with tear gas being let off around us, had the chaos of rioters running past us and heard the echo of gunshots close by. We later discovered that two men had been killed during these uprisings.

The mayhem all kicked off at about 10am. We had been teaching since 7.30am and were both sitting at the teacher’s desk marking books while the kids did the work we had set them. There was a bit of commotion and when we looked up there were two strange men in our classroom, one of whom was diving under our desk. Completely confused and slightly amused, we looked to the children for answers of what was happening. One of the kids shouted “thieves” and so thinking the school was being robbed, as we could now see more people running past the classroom, we grabbed our bags in terror. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have made sense for there to be thieves in our school because the only thing for them to steal would have been a few pieces of chalk or a couple of benches, but at the time it made total sense. 

The men then ran into our cupboard and the children locked them in there. I noticed two men with fish bowl like helmets on and large guns strapped around them escorting a rioter past our window. Bewildered, we asked Haggai, one of our pupils with good English to translate all the Nyanja words being thrown about and fill us in on what was happening. Throughout the day we discovered that all the taxi drivers and bus drivers were rioting in the town and the Zimbabwean markets (which back onto our school) about an increment in taxes. They were throwing rocks and hitting cars with sticks while the police tried to discourage them by letting off tear gas. In an effort to find safety, they were all jumping over the walls into our school, bringing the pandemonium with them.

The bedlam continued for the majority of the day and we didn’t venture out of the school until about 2 hours after school was meant to finish. Hundreds of the children who had tried to leave ended up running back to the school minutes later in fear. For the most part we gathered as many children as we could into our classroom and locked the doors and the windows. Some of the boys were being typical adventurous kids, wanting to be out in the brunt of it but we had to take the responsibility to tell them exactly what to do. It was pretty entertaining though, seeing them standing at the threshold of the path outside the classroom, making every excuse possible for why they needed to leave the room begging “teacher, teacher, may I leave the room?”.

Feeling the effects of the tear gas was pretty scary but it was even worse trying to console sixty sobbing, sweating, terrified children at the same time. I was wearing a Khatanga, which is like an African piece of material wrapped around shorts, which I had to whip off and hold up to my mouth to breath. Thinking on our feet, we told the children to take of their socks and hold them up to their mouths as they stayed low to the floor, as some of them were starting to hyperventilate. There were people running around holding things up to their mouths all around and we felt very unsafe. Looking back, it’s amazing how together Amy and I were because we knew that we had to be the adults in the situation. It’s certainly something we’ve never been trained for! As soon as we got back to Jollyboys though, we both just broke down in tears from the stress of it!

I think the thing that really got to me the most was the lack of organisation and procedures that came into effect by the other teachers. I know that for them, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened but I don’t believe that this should excuse the blatant disregard for the pupils’ safety. It made me really angry having teachers suggest to us that we go and hide out in the principal’s office and just leave the children to their own devices. This is what most of them did, they just left the pupils on their own. Meanwhile, there were children as young as 4years old roaming the school grounds totally unsure of what to do. At one stage, Amy and I had to go and stand at the school gates filling people in on what was happening while we watched some of the other teachers just chatting around a tree. I simply didn’t understand this because even when I asked the teachers what they were doing they would reply things like, “I’m scared” or “it’s not safe out there, or in here”. We were pretty shocked that the school wouldn’t take such simple steps as to say, ‘if there is an emergency, all the teachers and pupils should stay in their respective classrooms’.

The day ended with a priest praying safety over small groups of children as they left the school. We stuck around an extra while with some of the really scared children and then walked them as close to their homes as we could. The thunder and lightning storm that began at about midday really didn’t help the fear as, at first, we thought the rumbles of thunder were bombs going off! The children really appreciated us sticking around though and some of them even came to visit us the next afternoon asking us to be their friends!

We decided to treat ourselves to a very fancy and well-deserved five star meal on Friday night at a hotel so posh that they even give you a stool for your bag. It was a nice ending to a pretty emotionally straining week! We are both absolutely fine now though and having had a lazy Saturday to recover, we are well ready to face whatever Zambia throws at us next!

Oh and P.S. Mum, maybe don’t print this week’s blog for Nana to read….!