Lauren Orndorff's Reports

"What are we doing here again?" These words have echoed across our wobbly kitchen table so often since January 11th that it's almost surprising they haven't found a way to imprint themselves more permanently among the crumbs and dirt and silverfish. Amazingly enough, it seems that we have not yet found the answer to this question. Even more amazingly, as the days pass, our need for an answer presses us less and less.

Our days, instead, have somehow become full with marathon reading, piano lessons, yarn-play, baking, and (oh yeah) teaching. Ah, teaching. Our time at St. Rodrigue High School has already filled my days with an endless supply of questions, confusion, laughter, frustration and sighs of contentment. Take, for example, our first staff meeting, two days before the start of school, where only half of the teachers had arrived. Or our first week and a half of classes, when no timetable had yet been created, and so each of us relied on 2002's timetable to determine our schedule. Teachers, when double-booked for a period, simply selected the class they wanted to teach more, and students stared blankly at the front of a teacher-less class for upwards of two and a half hours a day. Eventually, though, timetables work themselves into some semblance of routine.

And then we discovered our students.

There is this wonderful sense of time here that allows only room for the present tense. No dwelling on the past, no worrying for the future. This makes for a delightfully relaxed, stress-free existence here in the mountains. It's lovely how this mindset has already seeped into our daily lives, and I embrace the idea that Emily and I will return to our former, stateside lives more attentive to "now". But when you apply this lack of both past and future in the classroom . . . tests that should take 30 minutes take over an hour, staff meetings drag on endlessly, and students seem fundamentally unable to retain or apply information covered even days ago. For the handful of "gems" that I see in each of my classes, their determination to succeed guarantees they will learn the material, sometimes (I believe) even despite my teaching. The rest, it seems, I will drag kicking and screaming through the end of the year, and I will ensure that they learn something, even despite themselves.

For the fraction of our school day when we are not battling our students on the class-front, we find ourselves in the trenches of the staff room. Within this room, we are very much outsiders. As often as not, announcements are made in Sesotho - which neither of us have a grasp of yet. Schedules are changed, meetings arranged, and Emily and I remain oblivious to all. We miss our first period, unaware that the day began 45 minutes early, half our class disappears to go dance at a feast, classes are smushed into our morning schedule so school can close at noon - to all this, Emily and I can only shrug our shoulders and sigh a hearty "Eh".

In spite of all of this, we are settling in and finding a place here. Just this week, I saw the first spark of interest in my math students eyes' as we began our section on angles. My language classes erupted in eager questions when I allowed our discussion to stray towards the topic of life in the United States and how it differs from Lesotho.

And, yes, Emily and I still occasionally look at each other across our kitchen table and ask, "What are we doing here again?" The unreality of this, though, has gradually faded into the background, and we find ourselves asking this less and less. St. Rodrigue has absorbed us into its present tense, to the point that our weeks pass us by seamlessly as we attend to our daily lives. December will be upon us before we realize . . .