A Different Way of Living

The other day my dad asked me, if we also had teachers here taking care of the kids after school, during the afternoon. Just like at home… Especially since here we have children who actually live by the school (since their parents live too far away…) And this made me realize that I even found this question strange. I mean, I just find it so natural that we don`t need teachers like that, that I have never thought about it before. Here after school the children spend their time together: the bigger ones are playing together with the smaller ones, this way also taking care of them. I can`t really see groups here that would be defined by age (of course except for the classes) – like right now there are four kids next to me playing Barbie dressing on the computer, they are aged about between 5 and 11 and they are all playing together. They really enjoy getting to the computer lab sometimes and playing games like this, but of course besides that they have a whole lot of outdoor games too, that they can play together. These include for example clapping in different ways while singing, playing familiar games like `London bridge is falling down` and then there are some others that include jumping or dancing. Or having competitions of jumping with legs in a bag or moving on their hands while somebody is holding their legs… A lot of games that the smaller and bigger ones can all play together. They all like dancing a lot, too (and they are very good at it!), but reading stories together for example can be a common activity, as well. This way it`s just easy to spend the time. And also, like I said, being Africa doesn`t mean that they would use the computer, or watch TV sometimes, too…

Also, at the same time I wouldn`t say that they are without adults here. The school founder and her adult children, and some of the kitchen staff too, all live together with these kids in the house by the school. Also some of the teachers spend a lot of their freetime at the school together with all these people. It`s all more like a huge family living together and not an officially organized thing like having teachers at the school in the afternoon to keep the children occupied.

On the other side while people are in some ways a lot closer to each other here, this kind of unity also makes the unity of the family less important – or at least less visible. I mean that since the adults are taking care pretty similarly of all the kids, it took me quite some time to figure out who is actually related to whom. So as I see right now, while people here are all working together to maintain a good life and take care of everybody and while everybody knows their role in this unity, too (like when they are supposed to help with preparing the food without even being asked to), all this dusks the importance of family unit – that we usually place before the unit of the community in our European world.