WEEK 5

20 - 29 October 2007

Exams at the school. a trip to the Kwanza River.

The main feature of this week has been the exams. Depending on the group they belong to, the students had to face different topics – from Geography to Mathematics, from Portuguese to Natural Science – in a written test. As a member of the teaching staff (I still cannot see myself as a teacher, tough the students call me professor Alessandro, and I usually reply with an embarrassed look), I was asked to take care of a classroom each one of the three days (Monday to Wednesday) of the exams. It has been an interesting experiment to sit on the desk, on the other side, facing the students: another character to play, this time watching young people solving a test. During the two hours of each session, I closed my eyes many times pretending I didn’t see any cheat, and the sparkling look, filled with shrewd satisfaction, that many boys (young men are not as able to hide feelings as girls) shared with their classmates at the end of the test, proved the good job of both teacher and students. Sometimes I was even forced to raise my voice in order to keep the silence, and I was impressed by the power of the social roles, which are embodied, after all, only by names.
Next week we will have the oral part of the exams, and I expect to learn something more about human behaviour.

picture 1. morning bath.

It is easier, instead, for me to catch beauty – even if describing it is another matter. On Sunday I went to Barra do Kwanza, a small town lying at the estuary of the river Kwanza, about 30 kilometers south of the school. First I went to the beach, where the calm tide of the river spreads its waters into the agitated Ocean, creating, not far from the shore, an impressing vortex of waves, currents and foams that, raised by the wind up to the afternoon sun, washed it in white, and reached me in a cloud of marine mist.
After having given some bolachas to the kids at the beach (poverty makes people smart, and kids learn quickly the art of moving the tourist. Children and elderly people, in particular women, are my favourite subjects, thanks to the deep humanity that they show), I walked by the side of the river, where the tropical, finally flourishing vegetation and the furnished cottages of wood drove me for a moment back to the luxuriance of the Victorian Age, when legendary explorers like David Livingstone or Henry Stanley were asked to celebrate the power of Her Majesty by finding the Nile’s mysterious sources.
I went back to the main road. Beyond the place of my arrival, a few hundred meters further, stands a bridge, which past strategic importance is still witnessed by the presence of a police station. The bright turquoise walls of this thatched building, which is protected by nothing but a lonely guard, are framed at both sides by precarious huts of straw, suggesting, instead of the ideas of Law, or Authority, a different order of the World, that now, after ages of surviving, is at the edge of extinction: the life of the Past. I approached the guard to ask some information. He reacted by tightening nervously the grip on his washed Soviet rifle, as wrinkled and old as his face, and which after all these years looked more like a part of his body, rather than a weapon; and answered some confused words. I walked away. On the way back to the school, given a lift by a French couple, I escaped for a moment my anxiety by thinking at the purity that vision had meant for me, and I desired to be at that police station, to visit that place, to spy the silent life of the guard, and to learn the secret of his noble, ancient tradition of humbleness.

picture 2. after 3 days, water has finally come.

Sometimes the school is in short of power, and (much worse) of water. How much time and efforts we have to spend to save it for two or three days, waiting for the supply to come! Being without water not only means that we cannot wash, but also that we cannot cook, and the students have been forced to attend their exams at the beginning of the week without having breakfast and lunch. Only soft drinks give us some sugar to survive, and the lack of energies, together with the incredible heat, makes any unnecessary effort instinctively banned. In these moments it is hard to go on (although afterwards I feel a sort of hero), and a sense of impotence makes me desire to leave this abandoned corner of the World. Now more than ever, I understand my great luck, the chances (many times wasted) that I have had in my life, the privilege of being born in a wealthy family of a wealthy Country. The taste of food; the joy of wine. I miss all the pleasures that I had enjoyed before, unaware. A full appreciation, so it seems, requires comparison.