S.I. !Gobs Secondary School
S.I. !Gobs is a collection of long, low sandy-colored cement buildings. At first glance they look identical, but with each passing day it's possible to make small distinctions. The hostel (group of dormitories for the boarding students) with the dining/assembly hall between the girls' and boys' groups. Each building has an animal head painted on the end of it; the one I live in has a rhino head and word "Pride."
There are rows of casement windows along both long sides, with frosted glass panels outlined by metal reinforcements for security purposes. All are situated in a large, sandy open area punctuated by trees that have the greyish-green tone of olive trees, but they're not. There is no grass. Between buildings there are cement sidewalks, elevated about a foot above the sandy surface; without these your shoes would be terminally filled with sand. Even with them, sandals are not really practical. You end up dumping sand out of socks and sneakers after just a short walk. Yes, it IS a dry heat - the humidity can be as low as 15%, although often it's nearer 25% during the day, around 35-40% at night. Towels or wet clothes dry easily within a few hours, and if you leave food on dishes in the sink without rinsing, it quickly cements into a detergent-resistant coating.
We have “patios” enclosed by high walls in front of each of the apartments of the hostel supervisors, which are at one end of each of the dormitory buildings, connected to the students' part by a brief breezeway. There is a door inside our apartments that leads through the breezeway to the kids' side (the “block.) Our patios insulate us somewhat from the noise and dust of the learners commuting down the sidewalks about 30 feet from our front door. There are wire clotheslines strung between metal poles (which I routinely trip over when I go anywhere after pitch dark at 6 p.m.) where we can hang our laundry after we've washed it by hand or, in the case of many of the hostel teachers, by the learners. You can basically ask a learner to do absolutely anything for you (although Katherine and I have not adopted this to any great degree yet); carry your books or supplies, do your wash, run and get keys from someone, get food from the cafeteria if you desire, etc. etc.
Every morning starts with a staff meeting that begins at 6:45. The first siren goes off at 5 a.m., so there is no excuse not to be awake, although I usually doze for about a half hour before getting up. The school instituted sirens some time ago so that the hostel supervisors wouldn't have to tour through the buildings every time the students need to be roused or pushed out of their dorms for some scheduled activity. The first morning the siren went off I was sure there was a fire somewhere. The almost immediate rumble and chatter of kids coming to talkative wakefulness quickly made me realize that it is just an extreme alarm clock. In fact I taught my grade 9 English students the word “siren”; they just call it an alarm.
By a few minutes before 6:45 everyone, learners (the usual word for students here) and teachers alike are heading in a long stream towards the classroom buildings, stepping gingerly (me) or quickly (the learners) over the small drainage ditch that demarcates the line between hostel and classroom side of the “campus” On Mondays there is an all-school assembly before school, so the schedule is adjusted slightly, but the classes are basically 40 minutes long. During the assembly the students stand in close-packed rows in a large sandy area between two of the classroom buildings, with the choir facing them from the side. We arrived on a Thursday, so the school had an extra assembly the next Friday morning so that we could be introduced. Then they sang to us. We had heard the choir practicing on Thursday afternoon when we were moving in so we had a little warning, but I was not prepared for the feeling of being sung to by this amazing group of kids. No risers, no sound system, no pitch pipe, no written music or words, no accompaniment whatsoever - it was liltingly beautiful. It wasn't the early morning sun that brought tears in my eyes.
The choir sang the Namibian national anthem, a song about the Erongo region (there are 13 regions, the equivalent of states) and then the S.I.!Gobs school song. All of the songs are in English, but it is a melodic swaying English that is taking our ears a little time to become accustomed to.
The exclamation point at the beginning of the word "Gobs" indicates a click in the Damara language, which is a dialect of the Khoisan family of languages. There are four different clicks in the language, very difficult to pronounce for speakers of flatly-consonanted American English. In addition, Damara is a tonal language, and there is an additional nasal sound that is added to some vowels as well. When you hear people speaking Damara, it sounds a bit as if they are tsk-tsk-ing at you...At any rate, using clicks seems incomprehensibly hard, and singing them seems well-nigh impossible but the kids don’t, as we would say, miss a beat. They are delighted at my attempts to replicate the “!” at the beginning of “Gobs.”
There are four classrooms, all opening off a cement walkway, in each building. They have learner desks, sometimes even enough for all the students, but many with broken wooden tops or chair seats. S.I. !Gobs just received sturdy new teacher desks and chairs, and there is a large metal cabinet in one corner of the room. There is no clock, but the bells (although annoying and insistently “rung,” are not sirens) announce the change of classes. One delightful phenomenon is that when the bell sounds, the learners do not immediately slam their books shut and start to stand. If you (the teacher) are speaking, you can wait for the bell to finish and the students will still be looking at you expectantly. You can even go on and ask them to finish some brief task without a word of protest. They stand at their seats and wait to greet the teacher when they enter (having lined up in the courtyard outside until the teacher motions them inside) and then stand again and wait to be dismissed when the period is over. One unfortunatel characteristic of the classrooms is the scraping of the metal chairs on the cement floors - quite a cacophany, and I’m already known among my classes for saying “LIFT your chairs, ladies and gentlemen.” They clearly don’t understand why it bothers me, but they remember to comply to some degree.
I'll continue soon with more details of what it's like inside an S.I. !Gobs classroom.
Good night or, in Afrikaans, Goiei naand!!
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