The second to last day of me teaching before I would be booted and my classes taken over by other teachers, I was determined to talk to my principal. For once, she was actually at school, so I made sure to stop her when I found her in the Form C classroom and try to ask why I had to stop teaching so early. She gave me the same ol’ same ol’ schpeal that PC said I should be gone before the new volunteer comes, and the school board has (arbitrarily) decided that I should be done teaching, and ideally out of the village, by that time. I said ok, so according to your reasoning, I should be gone before the new volunteer comes: mid-November for site visit. That’s still a month and a half later than you’re trying to make me stop teaching. It was at this point in the conversation that the form Cs came into the classroom to start setting up desks in preparation for their exams after the break. I guess she didn’t want to keep having this conversation in front of them, so she said that she would need to supervise this desk and chair arrangement before fully answering me. So while the students slowly and meticulously placed and lined up the desks, cleaned every surface with an old beanie hat, and taped candidate numbers to each desk, I patiently stood there, just playing with Bo with a rope. It was killing me to wait, but I just put on a straight face and channeled all the patience skills I’d learned and was determined to wait for her answer. At one point, she tried to get rid of me by having me show the new substitute teacher how to copy some papers in the office. I reluctantly did so and went back to the classroom, then followed the principal to her office where I asked for her answer quickly before she did some paperwork with the substitute, as I still had a lot of stuff to do at home to prepare to move out. She must have been annoyed at my persistence and hoped that I might leave, but I stayed put.
When they were finally done with the paperwork, I asked again. Why shove me out now? I told her I wasn’t mad about the situation anymore, but I just wanted to know why. After pushing her for a real answer after she gave the same fake answers, she finally sighed and told me that last year, PC expected me to leave, saying that they wanted me to leave after I decided to disaffiliate myself with them. I told her that, actually, what she said was false and that they never said that I needed to go home. When I told the PC country director my plan, she was totally ok with me staying. At no point did they tell me that I needed to go home. This conversation just showed that my principal was either misinformed, or, more likely, making this up and using this as an excuse to say that we (the school) always wanted you here and it was PC’s decision to make you go, in my opinion trying to shift the blame from her to PC for what was happening to me. I had several students ask me why I was stopping teaching now, and I asked her what I should tell them, as at the moment had no answer but “The principal said so and wouldn’t explain why,” which the students found as ridiculous as I did. She said to tell them that I had to prepare to leave (for 2 months?) before the new volunteer arrived. As a last ditch effort, I asked her one more time: why such the large time gap, then? Being a bit frustrated at her not giving me a legit-sounding reason, I posited that perhaps it was because now that you’re paying rent for the new house and can’t pay for my house anymore, you just expected me to pick up and leave after that? I shouldn’t have just put an answer into her mouth like that, because when she quickly agreed to my suggestion, I knew that she was just looking for any excuse to placate me and make me stop asking questions. I let it go at that point, because my next step would have been to accuse her of being sick of dealing with me and my non-grant-bringing ways, and they just want me out of their hair and there’s little other reason to it. Like a good friend told me, I shouldn’t seek reason/logic from unreasonable/illogical people, so why try? So that was my last ditch effort. I stayed at school for an extra hour for that non answer. So now I just need to let it go, let it gooooo.
That afternoon, being so, so done with everything, I was on a role to purge my house. I filled two enormous empty dog food bags with trash and had a mini bonfire in the trash ravine. I gave my family a huge box of clothes (my ausis immediately started digging through it excitedly, like I was Santa Claus bringing them so many gifts), and some full dog food bags for the Bo Bo, who they would be taking care of when I moved out. My ‘me got pretty sad at this point, but I assured her that I’d see her again before I left. With the little amount of stuff I actually had left, I put it into a duffle bag and hauled it to the orphanage, where I’d be staying after I got back from a small vacation over the next week. Then I went back up to my house and recruited a bunch of neighbor kids to help me haul all the stuff I would be giving to the new volunteer to the new house. I had a long conversation with the new host ‘me when I got there, and she seems really nice. The property that the new house is on is huge, with some gardens, so I think it’ll be nice for the new volunteer.
My last task would be to ship some stuff home that I didn’t want to be hauling all over Africa in my travels, but that I couldn’t part with and leave here in Lesotho. Theoretically, shipping a box is a very simple process, but TIA, so it was outrageously complicated. Stay tuned for the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment