School Spirit

For the past few weeks at assembly teachers have been telling students “you know what, it’s ok if you’re not so good at school…your time to shine is coming soon” and last week it arrived. Inter-house. A track and field competition where they break the schools up into houses to compete against one another. I was placed in the Red House, aka Danger House, aka Fire House. These are names I had no part in coming up with, though I wish I had. There was also the Green House that had all of the smart kids so it was doomed from the beginning, the Blue House, and the Yellow House. I didn’t hear this until the end of the week, but Yellow House refers to itself as ‘Yellow Fever’…not insensitive or inappropriate at all.

Each house went out to fields around Brikama all week to find the best athletes to compete against the other houses on Friday. I usually spent the entire day sitting under a tree, eating wanjo icees and peanuts with all of the girls who didn’t want to run. Their excuse being that they were trying to get fat and if they ran then they would stay skinny. Imagine that excuse trying to work in America.

I was amazed by some of those kids. They were not only fast as hell, but they were running and jumping barefoot, and some of the girls were doing it with knee length skirts on. I had been warned by another volunteer that inter-house is just an excuse for the girls to dress incredibly scandalously and not get in trouble. The beginning of the first day I was confused by what this volunteer mean. All of the girls were wearing their uniforms…but then came their turn to run. They all took off their uniforms and underneath they had on their “running clothes” which consisted of mini-skirts, spandex shorts (above the knee!!) and see-through halter tops. Since all of the teachers are men, and probably wouldn’t say anything to the girls I took it upon myself by following them around and asking them where the rest of their skirts were…needless to say, they didn’t think it was funny.

Mr. Nyassi was in charge of the Red House. Right before the long jump practice he made every single person move to stand behind the jumpers because “some of the girls forgot to take their underwear today.” The long jump was probably the most fun to watch. The students would line up and run and jump one after another after another. From where I was sitting, I could see through a gap in the students watching. One Gambian teenager after another went flying by.

For the high jump practice, Mr. Nyassi ran around yelling “if you have short legs, don’t waste our time” at all of the shorter students lined up with high hopes of making it over that stick. Dreams dashed.
So after a whole week of this, the competition finally arrived. It was scheduled to begin at 3:00, but keeping with the Gambian way, it didn’t actually start until 5:00. Katie had come over that day and we made tee shirts to support my house. Turns out, the way Gambians support their house is to spend all of your savings on a tight, western-style dress, from the Sera-Kunda market, which matches not only all of your friends dresses, but also your house color. You also need high-heels that sink into the sand so that you can’t walk…and oh yeah, new hair. I’ll keep this in mind for next year.
They had rented a PA system (ahhh, so that’s where the budget for teaching aids went!) and put one of the teachers on it. Never a good idea when he especially loves the sound of his own voice. All of the female runners had their new hair. The Red Cross club had made a stretcher out of corrugated tin and two branches and when carrying it from place to place they never walked, only ran….cutest thing in the world.
So the Red House didn’t win, we took second place to the Yellow House, which by he way had way more students who looked like they were older than twenty than we did. But it’s ok, next year yellow fever better watch out. I’m going to be force feeding those Red House kids protein bars alllll summer. Prepare for the FIRE…house.