This Post Does Not Deserve A Title

School has just ended. It has been a day that I want to move on from, and quickly. My nerves and temper are shot from maintaining a degree of professionalism for the entire school day.

Meaning not turning into a midget hulk on every single one of my learners.

Of course, I have had days like this in every job. Everyone has.

Stateside, I go home, pour myself a beverage of choice, sit on my bum, and turn on the TV as a way to decompress.

Namibia-side, when work let’s out, I go back to my room and mark papers, lesson plan, keep up with these retched files I am supposed to maintain, and try to tune out all of the noise and commotion blasting through my windows and bombarding it’s way through my door. Learners asking for things, using/breaking my cookware and lotion and shoes, snooping through every item I own, stealing things from my kitchen while my head is turned. Teachers asking to use my computer. Radio static blaring through the wall of my conjoined house. I go for a run, and people follow me. I go to the latrines, and people follow me there as well. I tell them to go away. They do not understand. I lock my door, close my curtain, and sit on my bed, and my coworkers come banging on my door asking why Americans are antisocial. Guiltily I unlock the door and have a conversation. I come back inside to discover that the learner I left washing a pan is now examining and neatly organizing my underwear, which were previously shut in my wardrobe, into seemingly nonsensical yet weirdly calculated piles onto my bed. Another girl is now taping a magazine picture onto my wall of an Indian woman next to a printer, after having just arranged a bouquet of my pens and tampons into a peanut butter jar on my desk.

I cannot describe to you how much this kind of up-in-my-junk lifestyle goes against every fiber of my being.

It’s funny, really. Most days. But today it has stopped being funny. Just like this weekend hearing the word “oshilumbu” (a slightly not nice way to say ‘white person’) shouted at me had stopped being funny.

Honestly, I’m surprised I made it 6 months before getting somewhat infuriated by a few of the cultural norms here and the lack of respect I have been receiving from my learners. In fact, I will even boast a bit and say that I have been very flexible and adaptable. And tomorrow I will continue to be so. Because I know that this happens when you are living in a foreign country. Oh, how it’s happened to me before. And you just deal with it. You realize you’re being a prick, suck it up, and move on.

Today, however, I don’t want to. All I want to do is to lock myself into the isolation cell at a mental institution with a batch of chocolate chip cookies and a bottle of Jagermeister.

Because I am this close to losing my rag.

Of course, I am not writing this to complain. No-ho! This is purely educational.

If anyone is planning to move to a hostel school in West Podunk, Africa, they need to know that some days you are going to want to gouge your eyeballs out with a pool cue.

Of course the other days make it worth it. And of course I want to stay here (past December, if possible). But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, and if one more person takes a metaphorical panga to the threads of reason keeping my sanity intact, I am hopping on the malnourished donkey outside the school gate and riding to Angola.