Meredith Shepard

I went back to Kagugu yesterday. Brought my family with me to show them what this place means to me: children in the front row with their worn wooden rosaries, leaning forward . Pontien, director of studies, brought us around to the three classrooms that were still in session-all sixth graders in the middle of review for their national exams, the students I have spent the most time with. I introduced my family-sister, mom, then dad. Their clapping always rose at the end-my parents later asked why, and my only guess was that so few students at Kagugu have both parents that a whole family is worth celebrating.
We asked them if they had questions for us. I’d played this game with them already-asking them their ages, their habits, their names, favorite foods; and they had then reciprocated-the order of questions in each classroom always the same: “What is your name?”, “How old are you?” , “Do you have parents?” For my family it was also the same, each classroom listing identical questions and comments. “Thank you for sending Meredith to teach us”, we heard three times. “Do you have any advice for us in education?” one of the brightest in my P6D class asked. “We want to hear your voice!” each classroom told my sister. “What are your jobs?” “We thank you so much for visiting us.” My parents responded each time, “Thank You for taking such good care of our daughter. Thank you.”
I hadn’t expected appreciation, really. In two months of working there, we were whites who showed up most mornings in a big car or on motos, to penetrate the classrooms with fast English, or in my case, bad French. The screaming excitement we routinely received meant little to me: the attention was for my skin, not me. But in the classrooms yesterday, at the final good-bye to the last remaining students in the summer-school session, they winked back when I joked at them, pretended to shrink away when I pretended to push them, called my name when I walked in. My personal goal for the summer-to know and to be known beyond the barriers of difference-felt unexpectedly realized.
That night, long after I had left, I remembered a day in the classroom a few weeks ago before school was out, when I was sitting in the back observing a lesson and two children not from Kagugu hissed through the window “Muzungu!” Jean, a boy from the class just below the window stood up to look back at them, saying firmly “Her name is not Muzungu. Her name is Meredith.”