Fire!

The Rolling Stones are my go-to soldering artist. I was singing Honky Tonk Woman pretty loudly when Hussein knocked on my office door. He raised his eyebrows for just a fraction of a second but I just smiled placidly back. There is no way he's going to catch me being embarrassed.

“Afternoon Madam.”

“Good afternoon Hussein, how are you?”
“I am fine. How are you too?”
“I am just fine. How may I help you?” I pronounce every word as slowly as I can when I speak to my students. Hussein is one of my best students and his English is very good but he still appreciates it when I use what volunteers call “special English.” Right now there is a little hue and cry about introducing the term “level-appropriate English” instead but I'm keeping special English. It makes me feel like it's the nice English my grandmother gave me and that I only get out on Thanksgiving.

“Yes Madam. I wish to do the practical about which we were discussing earlier.”

He handed me the procedure he had copied down in his meticulous handwriting and I skimmed it. Its a chemistry practical and I understood very little of the theoretical basis but the experiment itself seemed simple enough. The trick was that we need to compare the reactions of two chemicals and we had only one. I had called another Iringa volunteer the day before and he'd told me that we could make the other by slowly heating something we had. “It should turn white. If it turns black you've irreversibly made blah blah blah blah blah...” He'd said. “But if you heat it gently you should have no problems.”

I fetched the chemical and got Hussein the bottle of Motapoa and a bottle cap to pour it into as well as the matches. Motapoa is a kind of semi-solid fuel I've never seen anywhere but in Iringa, Tanzania. It is the color of lemon-lime Gatorade, the consistency of sickly snot and has a smell that stings the eyes. But it is much simpler than getting out one of the kerosine stoves and I thought it should give Hussein better control of the heat.

By this time Bahati Joseph had joined us. He and Hussein run practicals together a lot. He isn't a star student like Hussein but he is much more charismatic and he takes his studies very seriously. He has a really deep voice and a lot of confidence. He also picks his nose a lot while looking me straight in the eye, which I have come to find oddly charming. Nose-picking isn't taboo here (sometimes, just to scandalize myself I try to do it while meeting someones eye or in my classroom which I'm pretty sure I am going to regret when I get back to the states) but Bahati really stands out in my mind.

“Afternoon Madam.”

“Good afternoon Bahati. How are you?”

“I am fine. How are you too?”

“I am just fine.”

I repeated the instructions for heating to both of them. Since Bahati's English is slightly worse than Hussein's I slow down even more and I start to think very hard about my word choice. “Are we together?” I asked when I finish at the end.

“Yes Madam.” They both say.

But I have learned to read Bahati's body language fairly well in the last few months and I could tell I'd lost him somewhere. I went over it again in Swahili and he seemed to perk up a little bit.

I went back to soldering, watching them out of the corner of my eye as they work.

Hussein and Bahati are my children. Even though they are my age, both taller then me and I suspect, at the least in Hussein's case, much smarter than me, I feel like their mother. They are so handsome in their school uniforms--white, button-up t-shirts, black pants and shoes-- and they are so serious as they weigh out the chemicals, discussing in Swahili as they do. They look like scientists and when I look them my heart beats a little faster with pride. Some parts of my job are torturous, frustrating and heartbreaking. This is not one of those parts.

I worry about the fumes from the solder. I've been breathing them for hours in this cramped office but now that they're here it seems somehow more dangerous. I want to take it outside but I don't like to leave them alone with a flame so I open all the doors and windows and tell them they must let me know if they start to smell it.

I was back to thinking about soldering when suddenly there is a noise like an enormous fart and both Bahati and Hussein shout. I jerked my head up and found that there was a burning pile of motopoa on the table and on the ground and (thank Jesus) not on either of them. I could see instantly what had happened from the twisted plastic bottle in Hussein's hand. The motopoa had run out in the little soda bottle cap they were using as a stove and they had tried to add more without extinguishing the flame first. The fire had shot up the stream of motopoa into the bottle, causing Hussein to jerk his arm away, spilling it.

For what seems like forever they both looked at me warily as the motopoa smolders on the desk. They expected to be shouted at for this I could tell. A Tanzanian teacher would certainly shout at them, possibly beat them. Instead I laughed. I couldn't help myself. I quickly went to blow out the flames on the table and the floor.

“Well,” I said when nothing is on fire, “today we have become more educated. Now we know something that we should not do with motopoa.”

Bahati laughed a little too but Hussein still looked stricken as they clean up the spill and I helped, giggling to myself. “Madam, why are you laughing at me?” He asked, sounding genuinely hurt.

Instantly I stopped laughing. “Hussein I am not laughing at you.” I said firmly. “I'm laughing at myself. I should have been watching you more closely. You are students and there is no reason you should have known that could happen.”

The next day Bahati and Hussein came back and took the chemicals they'd made to perform the lab. Since none of the chemicals are toxic and there is no heat source in the experiment I let them go by themselves to the lab while I staid in the office to grade the quizzes I gave Form V. About an hour later I hadn't finished but I had gotten bored so I wandered over to the lab to see if they have questions or if everything is going smoothly.

To my surprise it wasn't just Hussein and Bahati who are crowded around the lab bench. About ten other students were watching them as they work. I'm not the only one who has figured out that Hussein is brilliant. For a second I just watched from the door as they watch him work. They were almost completely silent. There were too many of them to comfortably fit around the bench. One of the nearest had been forced to put his head down almost to the lab bench so the student behind him could see better. These are my children and I am so proud of them. They're so smart and so dedicated and when they help each other it almost breaks my heart with how sweet it is.

I think I am going to try to figure out how to download a video from Youtube of someone pouring gasoline onto a flame and it shooting up into the gas can. I bet Hussein would like to see that.

Speaking of fire... here's a video of my next door neighbor burning her corn fields!