I had two terrible days last week. The flies are relentless and buzz around constantly, especially at night. I swat them around with both my arms, almost dancelike. I felt like Candance from Phineas and Ferb when squirrels were trapped in her pants, and she started freaking out, but people thought she started a new dance trend. Except here, no one else’s arms are flying around like crazy. After two nights of too many flies, I left the office early to lay down on my bed. I called my parents and called Jiwoo, in panic, saying that I can’t do this anymore. Mom had the idea to put up the mosquito net to calm down my anxiety, which I did, and it helped. Except it looks like one of those coverings on top of a princess bed. Later that I night, I saw a gecko in my bathroom, screamed, then ran to the office looking for help. With a broom in hand, the Humanities teacher joined me to evict the gecko, only to find that the lizard was no longer in my bathroom (I pray that it crawled back out the window). Several hours later, around 2am, the school dog (who was sleeping outside my door) got into a 20 min brawl with two other dogs. One of the dogs it was barking at was her alleged mother, who often comes to campus to check in on. Though I now think they sounded like three dogs from Hell, the only thing on my mind was worry that blood would be all over my shoes that I had left outside my door. I woke up the next morning to find my shoes a few meters away from my door and a lot of wet stains on my veranda.
When recounting these stories to the students and the TAs, they all laugh and tell me that this is only the beginning. The snakes on campus, baboons, and scorpions have just not made their guest appearance yet. Sometimes when returning to my room, I trip over tree roots and run away thinking that the root was a snake. I now keep my shoes in my room because the scorpions apparently like to make themselves comfortable in empty shoes. I have yet to see a baboon, but I hear they have started to make their way to the garden. A TA reminded me last week, “this is literally a forest,” which I still haven’t realized.
The toilet is possessed. It grumbles like a subtle timpani roll in the back of a Beethoven Symphony. I think I may be sucked in eventually.
I finally ate sugarcane and have been enjoying some of the Zimbabwean snacks including maputi (popped maize, like bigger popcorn).
Even though I am several thousand kilometers away from home, I still feel connected to the states – especially since I still receive ads and notifications from DoorDash, NYT, and the RealReal. The Prada and LV clothes on campus are all FakeFake, which I don’t think students realize. I chatted with the school driver, asking him if he knows how much authentic Gucci is – he said he didn’t realize it’s a luxury brand, and when I told him the price of a shirt, he nearly crashed the car, “I could start a chicken project if I had that kind of money.” I’ve started to drive, and the most challenging part isn’t driving on the left side but is hitting the indicators instead of the windshield wiper.
I started helping out with a lot of small projects over the past two weeks which I find to be really fun and a good way to break up my day. ( helped organize a faculty office clean-up and all-campus clean up, automated the school’s calendar system, organized a field day to help students destress, built water distiller for the lab (and then proceeded to break it), have been taking pictures and made student IDs, am currently revamping the school’s health systems and making an EMR, and have been helping a teacher re-structure the school library’s check-out system. I think my biggest accomplishment to date was when I won the library book contest in the 2nd grade with Cate Ayers – we were tasked to use the school’s Dewey Decimal system to locate books, the books had clues in them, which would lead us to the next book.
The evening greeting in Shona – Maswerasei: how was your day? When I say it, I usually get a response of “what did you say?” or laughter. In Ndebele, the phrase: sleep here and listen to this one and that one is a series of la la le la le la … something like that. It sounds like Deck the Halls.
I am still struggling with understanding English here (which is weird because I am a native English speaker). What is more challenging is when students speak in Shona and shortly after say, “I’m sorry, I can’t explain what I’m saying in English.” Luckily, the Humanities teacher usually knows and will tell, “she used an inanimate object noun class to refer to you” … which I still don’t understand. I feel like my grasp of the English language has been deteriorating – not to say that it was ever good to start with, I usually speak like the comments section of a TikTok. But lately, I haven’t been able to speak with the same nuance and complexity I had in college.
The school dog has been really into barking at completely darkness lately. Sometimes she has a big bark, sometimes it’s a small one that sounds like woo which I am sure if short for woof.
Everyone still thinks I’m White which is confusing to me. In college, I used to watch a TikTok compilation video on YouTube every night before bed, religiously, until the account stopped making them daily. Lately, I’ve been watching bloopers and clips from The Office, and was keeping up with the US Open until Serena Williams lost. Why do I feel everyone suddenly got into tennis (everyone meaning Hannah and Jiwoo)? There is this scene in The Office when Kelly Kapoor sees Jim Halpert after a long time and says that so much happened to her since he was gone: “Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes had a baby and they named it Suri, and then Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had a baby too and they named it Shiloh, and both babies are amaaaaazing.” James (Head of School) gets back tomorrow from the states – he just got married last weekend, and I’m super excited for him to be back. I feel like our relationship is like Jim and Kelly’s – Jim is a tall white man that is pretty reserved, and Kelly is a scatter-brained, dramatic Indian lady that has nothing useful to say.
This week was my first week of full teaching as Mr Neil (they don’t put full stops [periods] after titles). I’ve been loving it – preparing for class, teaching, and then answering questions at office hours, etc. I think it’s going to be a good term with teaching, projects, leading extracurriculars, and hopefully exploring the country.
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Me, protecting myself from the flies, but keeping my ears out because everyone speaks so softly
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