My Lockdown

IT IS THE end of March and it is 4:30 on a Wednesday morning. The insects buzz outside; the birds not yet awake. It is never silent here. If I look out the window, I can see a few gleaming spots on the horizon, like stars that have sunk too low and stuck to the morning dew of the earth. The few houses across the valley that keep an outside light on all night. There is a faint light glowing where I know the compound gate stands, hidden from my view by some nursery school classrooms. 

I sit in the corner of the library closest to the door, not by choice, but because that is where the working outlet is. It is also the darkest corner of the library, as that is where the only non-working ceiling light is. Unlucky combination I guess. I sit on the floor, also not exactly by choice, but because all the desks are piled with stacks of books and there is not enough space on them to fit the piles of homework I am preparing. 

At four months pregnant, my belly is just starting to emerge over the hem of my jeans, especially when I sit cross-legged on the concrete floor. Those who know me well recognized it before we made the announcement a couple of weeks ago; other, less-perceptive people, were surprised with the news like we were in the beginning. I haven’t yet felt the baby move or heard the heartbeat, so my visibly growing stomach is finally some physical evidence of the life we have been told is growing inside. I sit comfortably and welcome the knowledge of the little life’s company this early morning. 

Ignoring the hum of insects that have entered through the pane-less windows, I survey the scene around me. Thirteen Pringles cans are scattered across the library floor, each with a label on the side: P.1 A, P.1 B, P.2 A, and so forth, up to P.6 B. Each can holds an eraser, a pencil sharpener, one pen for each member of that group, and as many colored pencils as can fit. We have close to 200 children on the compound and we want to keep them busy and educated while schools are closed, but the government has recently made a new coronavirus rule that people should not gather in groups of more than five. 

Two hundred children divided into groups of five. Okay. 

We are doing our best. We have divided the nursery and primary school children into small groups according to class, so at most they have activities with seven people. Every day they have two activities that last for two hours each. During that time, one hour is spent on homework and the other is an activity such as art, PE, zumba, card games or music, led by a teenager or adult. It will suffice for the one month school is closed. 

I prepare the homework, which is proving to be more time consuming than I had originally thought. For one, it turns out I don’t really know what the different ages should know. When school is in session, I work with children who are behind in reading and math compared to their classmates, but I almost never work with children who are at the level they should be. How many numbers has a six-year-old learned, and does she know what she can do with them? If I tell a fifth grader to write a short story, should I expect correct punctuation? 

I pore through library books and activity books, writing on sticky notes how many copies to make of each one. I check the work that came back the day before to assess whether the work was the right level. With non-teachers as the teachers, sometimes it is hard to know if the work was beyond the level of the children or the instructions were beyond the level of the teacher. A first grade group was supposed to copy a card with some words and write the rhyming words on their papers. Instead, they all traced and colored their hands. I shake my head and move on. Eventually I will get all caught up, right?

One group is doing homework. 

Puzzles is a weekly activity.

This is how I sometimes manage to organize the homework.

This is how I usually manage to organize the homework.

IT IS THE end of May and it is 4:30 on a Saturday morning. My husband sleeps peacefully in one bedroom; my daughter in the other. Once in a while I can hear a lonesome snore or the sound of someone shifting position—with Patricia that is usually accompanied by a thunk as either she or her cup hits the wooden slats on her bed—and I find comfort in the company within my own home. 

I was always naturally an early riser. However, 4:30 on a Saturday morning is pushing it, even for me. It is not my first choice to get up before the roosters and the Muslims in the mosque, but during the week my workdays are so long that I miss my family. My time with Patricia has been relegated mostly to getting her ready in the morning, making her lunch, making her supper and getting her ready for bed in the evening. We can make quality time of it, but it takes effort. If I want to spend non-working time with her this weekend, I need to get work done before she opens her eyes and calls my name. Hence 4:30 a.m.

I see many Facebook posts of friends in America—and even people here—with photos of them and their children, saying that one benefit of lockdown everywhere is that they get more quality time with their children. I try not to be jealous, but I envy them nonetheless. I miss my child. On Sunday mornings when I need to go to school to prepare homework for all the groups, Patricia stands in the doorway and cries, shouting “Mama!” over and over again as I walk away, and it breaks my heart. 

Schools did not open after one month. There are rumors they will open soon, but no one knows the truth. We all wait, watch on TV when the president speaks, and shake our heads in disappointment when he announces more restrictions that people will likely not follow. And we do our best. What else can we do? 

Our lockdown program has not changed much. I asked a teacher to help prepare homework, dividing the groups between the two of us, and she has been a lifesaver. I no longer have to go to the library before the break of dawn five days a week, though I do still bring homework to prepare from home in the evenings after Patricia has gone to bed. I have not had a day off in nine weeks, but as soon as school starts again I will leave the libraries in the hands of others and take a week-long vacation. That should happen sometime in the next few weeks, surely.

I adjust the papers on the table so I can see all the lists I am using—the empty grid for the program next week, the children who are in band and cannot attend morning activities, the types of activities the teenagers are willing to lead, which day and time each auntie from the children’s home is available, the teenagers who are in a Friday afternoon Bible study and cannot lead activities at that time… I need a bigger table. Because the leaders in this program are from different departments and their schedules change week by week, I need to make a new schedule for the 17 groups of children every week. I have timed it, and from start to finish it takes about nine hours to put together the schedule. That is usually the whole of my Saturday. If I want family time on the weekend, it means a late Friday night or an early Saturday morning, but it is worth it. I don’t mind the work. In the beginning, the first day of lockdown when we were brainstorming what to have the children do in the one month without school, I offered to make the timetable because I do the same sort of thing in the holidays and have experience putting together those types of programs. I have yet to meet anyone here who actually likes doing it, so it was also an offer to spare others the headache of doing it themselves. I did not imagine at the time that nine weeks later I would still be doing it, with no visible end in sight. 

Christian would like me to be home more often. He says I am working too much, too hard. He is probably right, but what choice is there? Everyone is putting in extra time and effort. 

“I am not doing this out of bitterness or just a sense of responsibility,” I tell him one evening when we are having that conversation again. I am tired and in tears. “I am doing this because I love the children and I really think this structure and having a program like this is the best thing for them right now. They might not see it that way, but I am being honest when I say the main motivation behind the early mornings and late nights is love.”

At six months pregnant, my belly bumps the table every time I stand up to make another cup of tea or go to the bathroom because I have been drinking too many cups of tea. It is getting to the point where I need to consciously make space for the extra area I occupy. I still find it interesting that a few extra inches in the front makes such a big difference when navigating through doorways or between desks in a classroom. Our baby boy is growing fast, and now he contributes to my early morning work with kicks and punches and somersaults. He is a welcome companion while my other favorite people are sleeping. 

Saturday morning, 4:30 a.m.

Saturday morning, 7:30 a.m.

The timetable after one hour of work. 

After four hours...

After eight hours...

After nine hours and finished. This is the schedule for half a day.

IT IS THE end of July and it is 3:13 on a Thursday afternoon. Though it has been raining most afternoons in the last two weeks, today the sun shines bright and cheerful, a contrast to how I am feeling at this particular moment. 

Schools are still closed. There are rumors that they will not open at all this year. With each passing day and no word from the government, I believe the rumors more. It would take too much time and effort to adjust the curriculum to account for only half a year of school. In February, the beginning of the school year, would students move on to the next class or stay in the one they started this year? It can be beneficial for students to still go to school for the sake of learning even without being promoted to the next class, but no parent is going to pay school fees for a “wasted” year such as that.

Our program is continuing, but people are growing tired. I do my best to not be one of them, or at least to not show it on the outside. There is an ever-widening gap between teenagers who love leading activities, filling in where others cannot make it or volunteering to lead more activities per week than is required of them, and the ones who are uninterested, sometimes refusing to come when they are scheduled and even, on occasion, hiding from the children so they cannot be found and forced to lead. Something needs to change, and I do my best to be patient as I wait for answers and help from our management team. 

In the meantime, I am in the library. Of course I am in the library. I think I live in the library. Probably the children also think I live in the library. 

My plan for the afternoon was to prepare the homework for tomorrow so that tomorrow I can start working on the timetable for next week and hopefully, hopefully, not need to see 3:30 on a Saturday morning this weekend. But my plan started falling apart an hour ago when one leader brought a discipline case to me that he could not handle, and it has been continuing to fall apart with each leader who has come with another child who is disrupting the activity and the group and who needs to be handled by an adult, not a teenager. I have had a conversation with Robin about how to be a good friend and now he is sitting on the floor writing three ways he can be a good friend to others in his group. I have heard from Innocent about what happened with his group, talked with his leader and sent him back for his activity. Now Auntie Maggie is outside talking with a whole group of fifth grade students, and I can tell by the way she has been glancing through the window periodically for the last 15 minutes that she has been waiting for me to finish with Robin to bring this case to me as well. 

I take a deep breath and go outside to hear what the issue is now, doing my best to muster up a patient smile on the way.

“Auntie Katie, we have a real problem,” Auntie Maggie begins. That is never a good start. “Aaron has beaten Tessa because she put his homework paper next to Hasifa’s, and he is refusing to apologize.”

It sounds like a stupid reason to beat someone, so I try to confirm with Aaron. “Is that true?” I ask him. 

“Yes!” Tessa chimes in without invitation. “He doesn’t want anything of his to touch Hasifa. Even if she opens a door before him, he uses a paper to touch the door handle so he doesn’t have to touch it after her, and he won’t sit next to her in class.” 

I repeat the question to Aaron. “Is it true, what they have said?” He nods. 

“Tessa, are you okay?” I ask. She nods her head. I send the rest of the group back to class with their leader and Aaron and I find a place to sit and talk. 

“Why do you do that?” I ask point blank. 

“Auntie Katie, when Hasifa first came at the beginning of lockdown I knew she needed help. She cannot read very well and she is not good in maths, so I wanted to help her so she could do what we were doing. But every time I tried to help her she abused me or told me she didn’t want it, so I stopped.” 

I had not been expecting such an honest answer right away. He was making it easy for me. 

“How did it feel when you tried to help and she abused you?” I ask. (In context: “abuse” here means to call someone bad names.) 

“Bad,” he answered, hanging his head.

“So she made you feel bad, and now you want to make her feel bad, right?” 

Silence. After a minute, he nods his head. 

“Aaron, I know you know your Bible stories very well. Think about what happened before Jesus was crucified. What kinds of bad things did people do to him?”

“They beat him. They used a whip on him. They made him carry the cross. They spit on him and abused him.” 

“Yes, they did all those things, and even more. Do you remember what they put on his head?”

“A crown of thorns.”

“And what did Jesus do to all those people when they did the bad things to him?”

Aaron doesn’t skip a beat. “He forgave them.”

“Precisely,” I say. “And did he forgive them after they all came to him and said sorry and started being nice again?” 

“No.”

“Right again. When did he forgive them?” 

“When he was hanging on the cross.”

“Yes. He forgave them while they were still doing the things that needed forgiving. He didn’t wait for them to change or apologize. He did the right thing even when they were not.” Aaron is looking pretty humble at this point, not full of anger like he was in the beginning. “I know you are not Jesus, but he does call us to follow his example. Do you think there is any way you can be nice to Hasifa, be her friend, and show her the love of Jesus even if she keeps abusing you and refusing your help?” He nods. “It doesn’t mean that you two have to be best friends or spend all your time together. But it does mean that you need to do what you can to be nice to her, even if she is not nice back. You two are in the same group, after all, so you need to find a way to be around each other every day.”

I tell him that before he goes back to his group, I want to pray with him. He prays for forgiveness for how he has been treating Hasifa and for help in being nice to her from now on. I thank God for Jesus’ sacrifice for us and that he forgives us, and I thank him for Aaron and the lesson he has learned today. 

“Aaron,” I say before he leaves, “I know it will not always be easy. But if you find it too hard to be nice to Hasifa and to forgive her, please come talk to me. I want to help you with this, okay?”

“Okay.”

That conversation is, by far, the best part of my day. Probably the best part of my week. I rub my enormous, eight-month-pregnant belly and hope that my son will be as teachable as Aaron has been this afternoon. I do not finish preparing homework this afternoon and I do not get an early start on the timetable the next day, but it is okay. 

IT IS THE end of September and it is 4:29 on a Friday afternoon. Schools are not open. Lockdown is still in place. 

Has anything changed in the last six months? 

Well, yes. Yes it has. 

The program I was organizing (however unintentional it was that I ended up running it for 22 weeks) came to an end. I gave my bosses a date for the beginning of my maternity leave, saying I could still help where needed but would not be organizing the whole thing from that date forward, and that became the last day of said program. The children had two weeks free—a sort of mid-lockdown holiday—and then began a new program put together by the management team. They are still getting used to the new rhythm, but it sounds like it is going well and there have been some good changes. I have not been involved in a single aspect of it, which is simultaneously unsettling and refreshing. 

It was good that Christian made me set the date for maternity leave because it gave us exactly one week to prepare the house and ourselves for the arrival of our little Elliot, who surprised us by coming two weeks early. 

So now it is the end of September. I have left the compound exactly five times in the last six months. It is a big compound, but it can be stifling at times. By the time Patricia was three months old, she had traveled to three continents. By the time Elliot is three months old, I am wondering if he will have even seen the road outside the compound. But it’s okay. We are all still doing the best we can, right?