Midterm exams began this past Friday, but preparations have been advancing for the past two weeks—periodically the teachers have (apologetically, shyly, almost creepingly) appeared outside the house where the volunteers, the accountant, and Mama Maristella live, presenting fluttering pages covered with meticulously drafted, handwritten exams for us typists to reproduce for them on one of the school’s beleaguered old desktop computers.

There are some real clunkers of exams that have passed through my fingertips—I tend to be most indignant about the English tests that I am unable to interpret, understand, or otherwise translate into any recognizable idiom—but similarly amazing are the science tests with the answer options:
The sun is a star because:
A) The sun is nearer (to what? than what?)
B) At night have sun bright (paint me clueless)
C) Sun is the last star (of what?)
Sometimes, in typing the exams, I and the others make mistakes, and we get corrections back in glaring red pen. I accept the science teacher’s demands that I spell “sulfur” with a “ph” and hemolysis with an “ae”, but I drew the line at renaming “aluminum” “aluminium”.

Some of the tests straight-up terrify me: typing the Kiswahili exams, with their long stories, comprehension questions, essay assignments, and heaven knows what else in what resembles a complex code, and a frightening one at that, rendered with the red, jaggedly scribbled teeth that underscore pages and pages in Microsoft Word. Typing these pages goes slowly, especially as my mind is prone to wander—I get stuck imagining what I might mean if I had invented the verb” alimchinja”. It sounds painful. Like doing the splits without lots of stretching first.

It’s also a strange and frustrating task to be assigned. Given the painstaking labor that so clearly went into the calligraphy, the hand-drawn diagrams, the tables rendered with Bic pen and plastic ruler, I feel as though this endless litany of typing and correcting lies on the interval between pointless and worthless—couldn’t I be more helpful in some other capacity? This, indeed, is the constant weight I drag about and I am still uncertain about.

Indeed, I don’t know that I am of much use to the girls. When I sit with one or two over their English notebooks, I rarely fathom what, according to their notes, are supposed to be the rules of my native language, and my attempt to equate English with Kiswahli is met with anger or fright. Or, when asked to lecture to the class of essentially non-English speaking Form I girls on the nature of “compound-complex” sentences, I am prone to a lot of hand-waving (a trait I hate in my own teachers) in combination with a great deal of hand-wringing (an inherited failing). In helping the girls with chemistry, we keep getting caught up with the periodic table and the charges of protons and electrons—which appear to change, in their minds, hourly—as what for me is essential background information is to them incomprehensible English babble and much less interesting than the actual answers to their homework, delivered ASAP. I am more successful with maths—demonstrating factoring is easy, until, that is, you get the girls who cannot multiply. I still shudder when I recall the aghast faces of Form III when I suggested that condoms prevent the spread of HIV. I briefly feared stoning. Perhaps the only thing I have done successfully is help a half-blind Form I student, Oliva, draw an outline map of East Africa.

This is compounded by the fact that I am only here for one month, and I am less than sure that anything I say, draw, or pontificate about will have an effect. The girls need good teachers who write good exams and speak good English. They need consistent teaching, where they learn to think, not to memorize—most of Form I can tell me what an independent clause is (“a sentence that can stand by itself”), in the perfectly harmonized chant of the successfully brainwashed, but when I ask what any of that means (or give them a board full of phrases—”big coconuts”, “if I go”, “I went swimming”, “because of this”) they could not identify one to save their lives. They need more than me, or more of me than I am able to give in just four short weeks. It makes me angry.

So, in the meantime, I type, I proctor, and I try to convince myself that, for the time being, I am not completely useless.