Imagination

We went to go visit a primary school on Tuesday afternoon to take our "official" tour -- we had already been their briefly during our second Amazing Race. It was a lot of fun, but, at the same time, very frustrating.

The school we visited is a primary (elementary and middle) school near here that some of our friends are very involved with. Because of the many different factors in this community that drive different groups of people apart, the kids are required to wear uniforms during school hours. Three quarters of the students are Muslim, so their time at school is the only time that these girls are without their head coverings. A couple of them we have met in town on other occasions -- fully covered then -- and they look so much happier at school, where they have a chance to exist on the same level as the boys they are in class with. Everywhere else they go, they are considered second class citizens, almost the property of their fathers and brothers.

In court here, a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man. The blood price for accidentally killing a man in an auto accident among the more rural tribes is 70 camels. The blood price for killing a woman in the same situation is 1 camel.

Outside of the culture that surrounds the school though, there were so many things about the school system itself that frustrated me.

Nothing in the Kenyan school system encourages creativity. There are class eight girls (eighth graders) who struggle to even color in a line drawing that we make for them, simply because they have never been exposed to art. It's not that their teachers aren't teaching them because they don't want to, their teachers simply don't know how either. Most of the teachers do not have the creative or spatial reasoning skills to put together a nine piece puzzle, so their is no way for them to encourage imagination in their kids.

Anybody that has been exposed to the classes that I taught at CHECK this last semester -- or has ever had a conversation with me regarding fantasy, or any other type of fiction -- knows how much of a big deal I think that it is for learning and creativity to be integrated completely.

The kids are incredibly smart, but everything about their education is rote memorization. I would love to get my hands on a class of them -- or a class of their teachers -- and see what I could do with them.

I wouldn't be very hesitant to say that a good portion of this country's problems -- including the grip of poverty -- stem from the fact that its people simply do not have the imagination to fathom that the world could be any different than what it is now. A generation that could be taught both to dream and to put their dreams into reality could do amazing things for this culture. But, in a public school system where primary school class sizes can reach 100 students per teacher, I can't see that happening any time in the near future.

If you want to pray for the people of this area, pray for eyes to be opened to the truth of Jesus and pray for dreamers who can see this place with what Shane Claiborne refers to as a "prophetic imagination," an imagination lit by the things of Christ.