Bidding Kwaheri (Dayton)

Thursday was my final day at Kimanjo Secondary School. With the exception of today’s rapidly approaching farewell to the ndovu (Swahili for “elephant), this might have been the hardest goodbye. Because we have to cover three schools on Thursdays, Helen and I have gone to the Secondary School every single week, letting Alex and Annelies split up the other two.

So this week, like the four before it, Helen and I left the Primary School’s lesson early (they were doing the “Stripe”—pronounced “Streep”—drama mentioned in an earlier post), and traipsed down the road to the Secondary School (this time, unlike the four previous, though of course quite welcome, we were joined by Colleen). The plan was to wander the area with a mzee, and the teachers told us the mzee was on his way. After we explained the lesson to the students, and still stood awkwardly waiting outside, we asked one of their teachers (Isaac, who I’ll miss) if he knew how soon the mzee would get there. He said around 5. Unfortunately, it was just after 4, and Helen and I would have to leave at 5. Whoops!

Luckily (thanks to the prescient advice of Colleen) we had prepared a backup activity. We performed the “Risk” game we had played at other schools, where students would have to determine why each endangered/threatened animal was dying off. We had played this at several primary schools (as dedicated blog readers will know), and it’s fun (though its subject matter’s depressing), informative, and low-stakes.

Playing at the Secondary School had a whole new layer. Students are asked to defend their choice for each animal, but at the primary level these explanations were relatively simple (understandably so). The older students were offering multi-sentence analyses of each potential cause of endangerment, occasionally making non-intuitive but compelling arguments. And no one had more fun than Ouma Vincent, the darling of the Northern Kenya Conservation Clubs, in his last year at Kimanjo Secondary and hoping to attend University and then teach conservation in the future.

The fun of the Risk game is that, while there is usually a primary cause of endangerment, there are also secondary and tertiary causes. So while some students might be more right, no one is necessarily wrong. Vincent seemed to pick up on this early, and intentionally picked answers that were less popular. He’d then offer an (often convoluted) explanation of how, in fact, his choice represented the most obvious of threats to the animal in question. It occasionally bordered on the absurd, but was usually quite plausible, and it was an impressive display of creativity and critical thinking.

The other students, too, were always insightful, and it was a good way to end our five weeks there. When we announced we were leaving, Vincent thanked us on behalf of the Club, and several students asked for our emails and/or Facebook names. We said our final goodbyes and hit the road.

We still had one day of teaching left, however. On Friday Helen, Colleen, Alex, and I went to Mpala Academy, teaching a fun lesson on PowerPoint, then playing a game about wild dogs. On Saturday we had “Discovery Day” at the Centre, where researchers and outreach coordinators gave brief presentations on their work for the community at large. I found it quite interesting, and after the talks enjoyed conversing with visiting high schools students from Nanyuki. Saturday afternoon we went on our last game drive with Jackson, stopping by a pack of wild dogs, four buffalo, two secretary birds, and two spotted hyenas, in addition to the usual suspects.

And now it’s Sunday morning and I’m leaving in two hours. After six weeks here, being in New Jersey’s going to be weird. I am excited to see friends and family, to keep working with Kate, Colleen, and Helen, and to start working with Julianne. I’m most of all excited to go see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in theaters.

But there’s a lot that’s not easy to leave behind. I guess the best I can do is keep as much as I can with me, in my thoughts, in my actions, and—as it turns out, quite literally—in my clothes, some of which are still seeped through with dirt (don’t tell customs).