Reality

These past two weeks were the toughest for me yet. A real dose of reality. I came into this thinking I was better than the rosy-eyed Westerner wannabe-hero because I knew some history on the country as well as some history of “development” gone sour, and that my expectations were tempered with this knowledge. But between the ballooning population of this once dying school, my 4^th-grade students begging me for more math homework, and a hundred kids dancing and laughing in complete bliss during Friday games, I really forgot all of it. I forgot the history, the politics, the skepticism. I began to believe the headmaster, inept but good-natured, was beginning to hold his own. I began to believe that the teachers were starting to show a little more commitment to their work. I really felt as if this school would begin to transform like a dream, slowly at first but then with decisive strides.

About two weeks ago, the cold, mundane reality began to dampen this dream. It’s the petty things, you know. Sometimes things so petty that you don’t even put them on the list of things to remember not to take for granted—like a photocopy error or an ill-timed rain over a leaking roof. And then there’s those larger obstacles that seem at once insurmountable yet equally petty, able to suffocate the dream without even commanding a solid presence themselves….

The principal obstacle of this kind was the school owner’s refusal to be fully financially transparent with us because of some rather contrived fear about his personal freedoms. No matter how hard I tried to explain to him that, by providing this very relevant and harmless financial information, we would be able to invest the money that would take his school out of bankruptcy, begin to turn him profit, and, not to mention, markedly improve the quality of education for the kids he claims to care so much about, he wouldn’t budge. We spent hours each day going in circles about this, he insisting on coming to an agreement about profit-sharing before releasing the rest of the school finances while I insisting on the reverse order. Ultimately, we were getting nowhere, except that I was going to bed drained and waking up frustrated: Almost 120 eager children, and one man’s irrational demands threatening to derail the whole thing! Without this financial information, we wouldn’t be able to ethically fund the scholarship or any other investments in the school, and my tenure as a teacher there would have to end with the partnership.

 It was really hard for me. I thought, could I have tried so hard for these children only to fail so fast? Would this be the first time in my life I would have to accept my determination was not sufficient?  What would happen to the children?

This would be a nice time to say the owner has come around and we have turned a corner, but I can’t say that (yet). What I can say is that I’m going to bed tonight without too much soul-searching. I spent the weekend sitting in the shade on a lawn chair at the guesthouse, reading an outdated Newsweek and sipping coke from a glass bottle, recuperating after a grueling week. Between pages, I spoke with another guest passing through, an itinerant Hungarian man who has spent the last ten years traveling Africa as a self-professed “moth-er,” a moth hunter and scientist (He has discovered and named several new species himself). He also runs his own ecotourism NGO to try to promote forest conservation in a continent that has less than 10% of its original forests left.

While we were sitting there, we heard a chainsaw rev up and attack a nearby tree—a common sound around here as cocoa farmers push further into the forest. He says every time he hears the sound, he suffers inside, and I believe it when I see his face. He says he knows he can’t win this fight for the trees and biodiversity, and soon it will all be gone. And yet, he has been doing it for ten years, and his resolve is unwavering.

 I’m not sure what meeting him did for me, but it somehow quelled my anguish. He is fighting on an infinite slope with no measurable goals, yet he is somehow content, in an odd way, because he is fighting. He says the things you see on this continent make you a humbler, more patient, more balanced individual back home, even if he may never go home.

I don’t know if it was him or the Coke, but I regained my composure this weekend. I remember the history that had tempered me before, now mixed with the experience of my six weeks here so far and the insights people like the Hungarian moth-er are helping me develop. I remember now that there can be no complete “success” here, but neither is there failure, because I really am learning something either way.