Schooling here is still in what one would call the 'old school' method, books are shared, much is done simply by repetition. I battle to try and get the boys to think outside of the box, improvise, think ahead, plan. Culturally it is not done a lot, the demand for it is not here, this is Africa after all. The pace is slower. Which is nice a lot of the time.
Then there are other times.
I see a kid standing next to a large pot eyes glazed over and I walk over to him and ask him 'what are you doing?' After the moment it takes to re boot from the dormant state I get a blink or two and 'Cooking lunch'. My response will be 'no you are not cooking lunch, you are staring out into space, what are you doing?' He gets a little nervous, smiles and shuffles his feet. 'I'm cooking rice' I lift up the lid on the pot and it is just water. 'No you're not, that is just water.' Shuffle, smirk, 'I waiting for the water to boil'. (Now we are getting warmer... so to speak). I ask him 'have you washed the rice yet?' (I think I just heard a penny drop) 'aaaah no', 'have you measured out the rice yet?' The feet head for the kitchen in short hurried steps. I walk off mumbling.
I refer to this as ABC thinking if you take out or change B nobody knows how to get to C. You definitely can not prepare C if B is not done.
As any parent knows keeping knives forks and spoons in the kitchen is a mission. You'll find them in the sand box, the kids room, the garage... When your property is 10 acres and you have 35 boys the mission is to even find them. I usually stumble over them rusted or when the rains quit and grass starts to die a little shine out of the dead grass catches my eye, once in the goat pen- I'm not even going to try and think through that one. I thus have made a rule that there must always be sufficient plates cups and cutlery for everyone to eat or nobody eats. Works pretty good actually.
The sugar bowl must always have its spoon as well. Sugar is consumed in vast quantities culturally. I keep a particular teaspoon in the sugar that they must use to serve their sugar. No spoon no sugar. If left uncontrolled 3 or 4 tablespoons of sugar will be used for breakfast porridge. 'Tea' would be 1/4 cup sugar and hot water... When I offer them some of my chocolate they will say 'no it rots your teeth..' Fine by me!!
One morning the line for serving ourselves breakfast has formed, and it is like a buffet line, first station- a cup of the dry porridge, next stop sugar, next hot water, next milk. We've had our prayer and the shuffle through the 'buffet' starts. I have my own one stop buffet- pour my coffee. I find my seat and get ready for the morning reading with them. A min or two has passed, I look up and notice the line has not moved. It is like there is an invisible wall at the sugar stop and 35 boys can't get around it. 'What's up?' I ask. 'We can't find the sugar spoon... they are looking for it', is my explanation why 35 boys are stopped at the dry porridge. Can you imagine that one little teaspoon has brought 35 boys to complete halt? I ask them 'is there a law that there must be sugar in your porridge before you can add water and get your milk?' Now the thing that was cool about this particular event is that it was like this group consciousness was awoken, a societal light came on. But I could tell it was deeper then the sugar bowl. They all broke out in laughter making fun of each other and them selves for being so daft. All they could joke about for the next several mins was the particular point, they could actually put the sugar in their porridge a-f-t-e-r they had hot water and got their milk. They understood you can scramble the ABC's and everything will work out OK, ACB works just fine as well.
I think one thing I enjoy most in what I do is when you see a concept clicks, they understand or makes sense to someone, when it happened on a group level, practically instantly, it was especially good.... almost as good as when they know that chocolate rots your teeth.

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