Pre-calculus

Last night I was sharing my pictures from Kasai with a friend who is from that area. I have a picture of a classroom at Lubondaie, which was where the “mish kids” attended school. It was the most difficult stop for them; they were profoundly disappointed by the condition of the station. Since I don’t have childhood associations with the place, I saw something much different. I saw buildings once used for classes and dormitories for foreigners now being used for the same purposes for Congolese. That looks like progress to me. The condition of the buildings was not perfect, but they were functional. And the school grounds were pretty clean.

Anyway when I showed the picture of the classroom to my friend, a chemistry professor, he saw the chalkboard and said, “They are doing pre-calculus.” He saw something that none of the group could see. They were unable to look beyond what they considered to be a degraded physical plant, which they, some in very harsh terms, blamed on the Congolese. “They are not doing anything,” some complained. Well, they are. They are teaching pre-calculus. Of course this does not diminish the material needs of the people in this community, but it does tell us something about memory and perception, reality and interpretation. From my studies of their curricula, most of the mission schools were not teaching pre-calculus to the Congolese.

This blog entry serves an additional purpose. I have had some very good exchanges with the folks I traveled with, and feel I may have been too judgmental in some in my earlier posts (and perhaps continue to be). I edited a few things when I added the pictures to my airstrips blog. But I do think, with the emotion of the trip having passed, folks back in the US are having some serious questions and reevaluating some of their parents’ work, and trying to figure what they can do to help.

The recognition that something went terribly wrong was overwhelming at first, but has now become unavoidable.