Macarena Plague

I accidentally brought the Macarena to Fitche.

It all started out innocently enough.  Last year, whenever any of my students’ phones would go off during class, I would confiscate it and then return it only after the student had performed “the chicken dance.”  It worked pretty well.  There were very few students who were repeat offenders after I instituted this punishment, it was an entertaining bit of 2^nd goal, and most of the students seemed to get a kick out of it.  With this in mind, when we were discussing possible means of keeping students from being late to sessions during Camp GROW Fitche, I brought up the possibility of using another dance as a punishment, the “Macarena.”  Soon enough, the idea gained traction with the other PCVs involved in the camp, and the song was downloaded onto a few different devices.  Everyone involved agreed that I should be the one to enforce this rule, seeing as it was my idea.

When camp came about and some students (and a few of our Addis Ababa University girls) started showing up late to our meals, someone queued up the song and started blasting it out of the speakers.  I stood up, stopped all students who were coming in late, and started showing them the dance moves, which they had to copy until the other PCVs decided they had done it enough.  The ritual repeated during most of the meals during camp, and I thought that that was where it was going to end.  I was wrong.

The Macarena has now infected the collective playlist of Fitche.  I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I know that patient 0 was a sook on the main road of town.   Jamie Minchin, the director of our camp, was walking down the street on either the first or second day of camp, when she heard that song playing loudly over the shop’s speakers.  She called me, laughing, and explained what she’d just heard.  I laughed too, thinking it was just a one-off, the result of one of the kids texting a friend about this funny song they’d heard at camp, but it didn’t stop there.  Now, on something of a regular basis, I hear the shops and restaurants around town playing it.  It can’t be a coincidence.  No, I have brought a 90s pop song into vogue in Fitche, and it’s spreading.  Maybe someday soon it spread southward until it hits Addis.  All I’m saying is that, should you hear this song blasting out of a Bole club, it’s probably my fault.

Note: If anyone reading this is an HCN and is not familiar with “the Macarena,” please go ask an American about it.  The odds are very good that they know what it is and would show you the dance upon request, at least if they are 30 years of age or younger.

~Jessie

A Surprise on My First Day Back

Last year I had a student who I absolutely adored.  For the sake of his privacy, I won't name him here. Suffice to say, he has a very common name, but that was pretty much the only thing common about this kid.  He was brilliant.  He was one of the top kids in a class of test taking dynamos, and, if I recall correctly, he ended term one with a perfect score.   He was always ready to participate and came up with very creative, thoughtful answers to any question I asked him.  He challenged the others in that class and made them better students as a result.  He was my good kid who I could lean on to get that class fired up and ready to learn.  Not only was he academically bright, but he also had this energy about him, like he was going somewhere with his life, and nothing was going to get in the way of that.   Also, if you’ve ever heard me tell the story of the kid who menaced a middle-schooler who was about to harass me on the street, that was a story about him.

Towards the end of the first term, I noticed that he was getting a little quieter and started missing some classes.  This was true for a lot of my students, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.  Then he missed the final due to “illness” and had to take a makeup exam to pass the class.  When second term started, he was nowhere to be found, and no one could tell me where he went.  When I brought up this sudden disappearance of one of my best students to my Program Manager at Peace Corps, he told me that sometimes these things just happen in Ethiopia, mostly due to family problems.  It made me sad to lose such a good kid who seemed to have such a bright future in front of him, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Fast forward to last week.  I was milling around school on my first day back (classes had officially started, but there weren’t enough kids there to start in on real classes), when suddenly a kid walks up behind me and says, “Hi, teacher Jessie.”  I turned around, and, to my complete surprise, it’s him again.  He looked a little harried and worse for the wear.  I welcomed him back to the school, and we sat down to talk for a while. 

It turned out that my PM had been right when he said that the dropout was due to a family issue.  To the best of my understanding, this was what had happened.  His mother had gotten ill during the end of the first term, and had actually passed away from the illness during the inter-semester break.  His father was already dead, so this left him and his younger sister orphans.  He’d dropped out of my school and moved back to his hometown Debra Guracha so that he could help support his sister in her studies.  (Note: It’s really common for kids in Ethiopia to either live on their own or with members of their extended family starting from their high school years.  The reason is the many towns do not have high schools, especially in the rural areas.)  He’d enrolled in the school there so that he could finish the 11^th grade.  Now that his sister was situated with one of their family members back in their hometown, he’d returned to Fitche to finish the 12^th grade.

When he finished his story, needless to say I was stunned.  I couldn’t imagine going through a loss like that at his age and still having the fortitude to go on like he had.  He’d gone back home to support his younger sister so that she could continue her studies.  This from a young man who’d grown up in a culture that, generally speaking, does not value girls’ education.  Even given this new pressure of looking after his sister with no mother or father in the picture, he’d still kept up with his studies.  Wow.

A lot of my students don’t really seem to value their education.  I know a lot of them probably are not going to go on past the 12^th grade.  It’s disheartening, and sometimes makes you feel like you’re throwing all your effort and energy on wasted ground.  Then you have the ones like Tesfaye who are going to pursue it no matter what hardship and tragedy they face.  I guess that the best way to put it is to say that I feel humbled, and I’m going to give this last year my all because of the kids like him.

~Jessie