We wish for real fans

Peace, at last. November 2nd, 2011. The days don't fly by, nor do they crawl. They lope, a steady pace through school and the quiet afternoons, filled with coffee and cards and light. I visited Alex's placement yesterday. A low-funded government school for people with disabilities, it lies a fifteen minute walk from our house down a dirt path partly shrouded in quiet shadow. We walk though a small cluster of houses, of fields of dead corn, along a muddy stream winding its way across yards and under roots of overgrown trees. Dominicki comes running up to us first, shakes my hand with a "goodmorninguh," brown eyes almost golden in the early morning. He is thirty-five, and can sometimes recognize the number six. He shakes my hand again and again, laughing all the while with teeth missing and the other ones rotting, and we laugh together, at eight in the morning, and he smiles and smiles, neither of us knowing why, and I say, nice to meet you. Gina lako ni Grace. He laughs, and we walk toward two nuns standing in front if a beige and turquoise building. Alex and Rianna introduce me to the head of school and the cook. How are your children, how is your mother? Nzuri, nzuri, always. I meet Patricki, drool marking trains down his green uniform sweater. "Ni ni ni ni ni nininini ni ni," he says. I am told that he cannot for words, and since he is also thirty-something, we assume he never will. I meet Shamzi, the seven year old epileptic with a behavioral problem and teeth that stick at 110 degree angles, shown often in both smiles and sullen moments. Prosper is malnourished, receiving one meal a day, at school, unless his neighbors decide to be generous. He stares at me silently throughout the day, a smile playing at his lips as he wraps his graceful and lithe fingers around pencils or a cup of chai. Peter, pronounced Peetah, has ADD, yet remains in a class with Lu, short for Lukresia, a woman with Down's and a shaved head. Some in the class will never speak, or learn how to add, while others have disorders that in the US, would be kept under control with medication. Godi has Epilepsy, but is otherwise a healthy teen. When we have music time, he shakes an improvised tambourine of soda bottle caps to the discordant beat of Old McDonald. We dance together, or Shaky Shaky, in a circle, Lu and Peter cracking sticks on the bottom of cadmean water buckets, Samsoni, son of the cook, on my hip and sleeping on my shoulder as fourteen students make as much noise as they can in the small classroom. 
In my class today, we colored masks I made a few days ago, in celebration of Halloween. I tied twenty seven crayoned plates to heads, taught the song, "Skidamarinkydinkydink," corrected homework, and watched between fits of laughter as Brianson gyrated to traditional music. I sat with Tesia and Melisa  Benidict as they held my hands, highfiving my dirty palms again and again. I gave candy, pipi, after porridge, and took away sticks from little boys that they scoured the dark ground to find. I acted the story of the Three Little Pigs, substituting the wolf for a lion. I traced my hand on the blackboard with Brian, a boy with a tiny nose and long eyelashes, and Fides, and we read sentences for the first time. 
I have not thought about my body, my looks, my outfits, my friend circles. I don't criticize myself, and I don't look in the mirror or put on makeup. I think of simple things, of dinner, of dirt roads, of characters in a novel that live far from my situation. I think of clotheslines, of white sheets hanging in the afternoon sun, of colorful patterns in a window, of mangos in a pyramid on the side of a dusty street. I think of burning garbage, of lizards, of the man that hangs a leg of cow in the butchers shop down the lane.