Happy voices babble on the circular steps of my front porch. I catch three, then four languages joining in a mixture of communication – the incorrect lisps of baby mouths somehow add beauty to all. These children give me my best chance yet at improving my Lubwisi; only children naturally include so much repetition and such a narrow use of grammar and vocabulary. Only these staff children mix their Lubwisi with English, helping me to translate what I don’t understand. Theirs is a simple Lubwisi, the kind I can sometimes speak. Naomi too has suddenly begun to speak Lubwisi, seeing the reason for it as she expands into African friendships. She has an irritating tendency to repeat the few phrases she knows over and over and over both to her friends and at home, to me. Her way of releasing the frustration of knowing so few words. But each day her knowledge will grow, I pray. We have to curtail our African English at home too – I find myself responding, as I bathe the children, “American English, please!” much the way I used to require an “indoor voice.”

As a beautiful Saturday morning starts with general cleaning at the school it flows into an afternoon of sports, handcrafts and conversation. The staff children and my own, join on our porch to help me prepare bugwanimbe, soya beans – edamame! Later they eat their naturally packaged snack (it arrives in the pod!) eagerly, sharing from a communal bowl with Naomi and Quinn. Staff kids, unlike our former village friends, eat regularly and are not compelled to snatch any food in sight. They make better sharers of the communal bowl.

Weddings happen often in my yard, enacted by the various sibling groups who make up our staff families; brothers marry sisters quickly and easily with most of the attention given to their finery. The single trunk I keep on the front porch, chock full of dress-up items from hats to shades to many simple but shimmery pieces of cloth, keep my children and their friends satisfied day after day. They erect homes, lay out gardens, build fires over the usual three stones and dig their own pit latrines for sanitation. All this using cloth and some much-worn clothing. Children are amazing.

I spend the morning making granola and yogurt so that tomorrow, Sunday we will rest and enjoy good foods, nurturing our bodies for the week ahead. Quinn picks basil leaves from his school’s garden and Naomi helps me prepare two batches of pesto; the perfect close to our endless summer days is pasta with fresh sauces.

David leaves early most mornings to walk around at the morning preps (homework time in the classrooms) checking for the teachers on duty and monitoring noise levels. After a full day of accounting, project management, team building and problem solving, he is out again each evening, checking the food line for quality, checking on evening preps. Students finally quiet down for the night at around 10 pm (which is when we leave it up to dorm staff to handle conflicts or disruption at night.) Students begin their day again at 6:30 with the optional morning preps, but we hear students even earlier, running around the track that circles our football pitch. Quinn is becoming slowly used to his dad’s erratic schedule, the constant comings and goings made very bearable by David’s rarely leaving the school compound. It’s nice to know that He is always within a few minutes walk, that someone can call him quickly if we ever really need him.

So we pass through our days; eating, laughing and sleeping together, joining forces to combat the problems of over-full latrines and lack of access to water. Living with this close community is a beautiful thing in so many ways – watching young people discover new joys every day, watching them become young men and women that they never would have been outside our fences. Yet there is a tension here, a constant realization of the threat of crowd discontent. Noises from students are a the ever-present meter of happiness. Some nights we stand on our porch listening to the volume and deciding whether to dive back into the fray that is student staff relationships. And it is a fray, for all of us. Tiring to be sure, and overwhelming. It’s hard enough to be parents to two – 350 is quite over the top for us and all the other staff who sometimes need parenting too. Yet we are adjusting slowly but surely to living out our lives in the place we have been called to.