I was a woodworking and technical drawing teacher in a high school, way out in the bush. The first day I got there, the Headmaster came to me with a big piece of poster board which was last years schedule of classes and rooms for the 15 teachers to all be able to have a classroom and time to teach all their classes. He said, “Maseko, you americans are very good with timetables, and now that the semester is going to start in two days, we need one for the (now with me) 16 teachers to have classrooms this year. You must figure this out. I do not have the abilities necessary to do this.” So I said, “Of course, Mr Mbingo. I will be happy to do that for you.” I tore my hair out wrestling with trying to make it work in our limited number of classrooms. But I succeeded just in time, and managed to give myself heavy days of classes on monday and thursday, and moderate days of classes on tuesday and wednesday, and have fridays off, giving me a 3 day weekend every week. IF you do something that the headmaster and teachers are loathe to do, you have certain freedoms, and nobody complained that I had only 4 day workweeks. They were too thankful that they did not get saddled with the job of the timetable.

My second 3 day weekend, I took the late buses on thursday afternoon from my school in the south, all the way to the north of the country, to visit a PCV (peace corps volunteer)teacher that I had met during my training, who seemed to be a master teacher, and I wanted to visit her and pick her brain. I had never been a teacher before. My closest thing to teaching was having been married to Jenny, a devoted 4th grade teacher. So I finally got to the school where she was, and we talked late into the night. The next morning, as we were getting ready to go to her school, there was a real rukus outside, and we ran out to see what was going on. People were screaming “Ingwenya! Ingwenya!” (crocodile) and running all about, and we ran to the river crossing, where students who lived on the other side would cross, to get to the school. We arrived just in time to see children jumping for the bank from the water, except for one poor little girl in the middle, who, just as we got there, was grabbed by the leg by a crocodile. My friend, who has been a super hero in my eyes ever since, leaped immediately into the river with a stick, and waded out to the girl who was being shaken by the croc, and proceeded to whale away at the crocs head and eyes, while pulling the little girl by her arm. The croc let go, and my friend galumphed back to shore at a run, rescuing the girl, and the croc disappeared. The little girls leg was torn up pretty bad, so I tore my shirt into strips and bound the wounds, and the headmaster raced off to the clinic with her in his car. I later heard that she lived, but that her leg was permanently messed up. I hugged my friend, and so did many of the people there.

Women matter. <3