Excuses, Excuses

I have so much to write about that I'm going to separate it all...

First story -

We now have cell coverage in Timbi, which is amazing. (My number is 60-75-12-50. Go buy an international phone card and call me sometime.) But, Africans with cell phones are rude. Remember when there was all the drama at the schools in the US about phones? Well, that's what it's like here. People have to take all these "important calls" and have no respect for the school day. Umm, how the hell were they making do the last 2,000 years until 3 weeks ago? I refuse to believe that these calls are that important. Certainly not more important than Mrs. Daum's English class.

So my official punishment for forgetting to turn off a phone in my class is confiscating it for a day. Second offense is a week. This week I collected 4 phones in 2 classes. I threatened to use them to call my mom and dad so I could use up all their credit, which the kids thought was hilarious. Anyway, after class this one kid comes up to me. He's a good student and he gives me this song and dance about his sick grandmother and how I can have the phone any other day but Tuesday night and whatever. So we go to the Surveillant (the discipline guy at school) and the kid tells the story. I accept his apology and we make a deal that he will give me his phone on Monday for 2 days and I give him back his phone.

At this point the Surveillant tells me about how much respect he has for me and how annoying it is that none of the other teachers have rules about cell phones (because if they had rules for the kids they would have to turn off their own phones...) So I was feeling pretty good. He thanked me for always being on time and being a good role model, etc. Pretty heartwarming stuff.

I say goodbye and am leaving school when another kid comes up to me. Here's a (shortened and translated to English) transcript of our conversation:

Kid: Mrs, Please accept my apology and give me my phone back. I really need it.

Me: What you really need is to learn English and to not disrespect me in the classroom. You can have the phone tomorrow.

K: You don't understand, I live with a blind man and he was calling me to have me come help him leave the house.

M: Okay, if you really want the phone, you can bring this "blind man" (in my head I was thinking, yeah, right you little liar) to my house and if you ask my forgiveness in front of him you can have it back.

K: He doesn't walk very well, but can I have the phone anyway?

M: Okay, (thinking I'm going to catch him in this stupid, crazy lie) how about I go to your house and meet this "blind man who doesn't walk well" and then you can ask my forgiveness and get the phone?

K: I guess so.

So we go to his house, which isn't too far from mine. His room is outside the house and he drops his books off. Then we go inside the house and I'll be damned!!!! There was a blind man who could barely walk laying down on the couch!!!!! And the kid did say he was sorry and the man apologized and said that he wouldn't call during class. We made an agreement that the student would keep his phone on silent and that he would warn me at the beginning of class if he thought he might need to take a call.

I felt like such a jerk!! Luckily Guineans don't understand sarcasm, so he didn't realize that I thought he was a little liar. The moral of this story is that Guinea is not America and that the people here are desperate and sick people have no government or private support system and are forced to make do with help within families, so I need to understand that there can be actual emergencies here and I might need to accommodate certain situations.

It was really funny, though. Can you imagine a kid in the US using that story? It would most certainly be a lie!! But not here...