It is easy to condemn the Emory students in that classroom. They weren’t children, they were high achievers, and they were representing a place with a real reputation. They were absolutely wrong in what they did. But there are also lessons to be learned. After all, Emory students do not cheat all the time. This was the only occasion of cheating I saw in my four years. This wasn’t a bad group of students. They cheated in this class because of the surrounding factors.
The Emory students saw the class they were taking as completely useless to their lives. What’s more, they were only there because of rules compelling them to be, and they knew bad luck had cost them enrolling in a really great class. They were upset, and with reason, and most important, they saw no threat of getting caught. The only consequence would be to their conscience, and some could justify that by saying the class had been inadequately taught—which is true. That explains the first handful. Then, the others see the first group cheating. They see that others are going to get an unfair edge. That could certainly make a more honest student mad. “Well, if they’re going to cheat, then I guess I should get what’s mine, too. I was supposed to be in History of Jazz anyway.” The next thing you know, cheating on the test is almost the cool thing to do, and the followers among them pile on.
Prior to Nimo sitting before me and confirming that she has cheated, too, I even verbalized to some of the teachers that if she was involved, then I would want to hang myself. I didn’t mean it, but that’s how much her integrity meant to me. But, in the event, I recover quickly. My depression lasts about twenty-four hours, and then I am fine. My recovery rests on a thought that keeps running through my head: Who told me it was going to be easy? I had come to a place that was broken, and I couldn’t be upset when I found some cracks run deeper.
The students came from an educational system that for years had condoned cheating. I’d witnessed it at the entrance exam, the first time I had seen the kids who were now my students. Later, I’d dig into the situation more, asking our students about it. They said almost everyone cheated on the national exams, and they weren’t exaggerating. They meant “everyone.” Education was a business in Somaliland, with tens of thousands of students attending for-profit private schools. Those schools wanted top scorers, so they could market the quality of their schools and recruit more students. To that end, most of them encouraged cheating. Some students would tell me about cheat signals they’d been taught by their teachers. From others, I heard that exam proctors would put their mobile money transfer number on the board and turn a blind eye in exchange for each student’s payment. A top student was told that he was to help other students as soon as he finished his exam. One year, a national exam needed to be postponed as it was for sale in the marketplace weeks before it was to be given.
Somaliland’s rampant cheating problem was just a macro version of what I’d witnessed in History of Folk Music. From what I gathered, the culture of cheating hadn’t been going on for long, maybe only a few years, but when it took off, it became completely out of control. By the time I saw it, everyone knew the score, but the momentum was far stronger than the political will to stop it. I heard rumors of a school disallowing their students to cheat one year, and the parents responded so furiously that the policy was reversed. With every other school cheating in the country, why shouldn’t their students cheat, too? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair. They were just like the students in History of Folk Music who hadn’t planned to cheat, but if everyone else was … Those who could do something about it in Somaliland were, at best, like the teacher, overmatched and overwhelmed; or, at worst, also profiting from it. That exam didn’t walk itself to the marketplace.
This was the background from which students entered Abaarso. They weren’t bad kids, nor could you even judge them in the same way as you could judge the Emory students. The Abaarso students were younger and far less educated; they had not been taught another way. Taking that into consideration, I allowed the three boys whose exams I had dotted for cheating to sit for a retest. After the entrance exam, we still wanted to add a dozen or so students, so we made our own test and offered it on a couple of dates, hoping to recruit the rest of the class from untapped talent. As I’d realized that cheating was part of an endemic problem, there was no reason we shouldn’t let those kids learn from their mistake. Academically, one of these boys was quite strong, one was midrange, and the other was mediocre, but all three made it in.
At Abaarso, we made it clear from day one that cheating was not acceptable. The punishment was well laid out. A first offense would result in a two-week suspension. A second offense would be suspension through the rest of the year. It didn’t matter if you gave answers or received them; the rule applied both ways. I guess the students thought we were bluffing, or else, cheating was so ingrained that they just couldn’t stop.
The boy who had been the most egregious on the entrance exam didn’t even take answers, but he couldn’t stop giving them away. He became the strongest academic boy in the school, and he didn’t need anybody’s help, but everybody sitting next to him wanted to tap into his answers. One time, he was clearly busted and was punished along with his answer takers. Upon learning that he had been suspended for two weeks, his mother called me to say our response was wrong. She spoke enough English for our conversation. “We never punish students for cheating in Burao,” she said. It was like the commercial where someone sees a friend’s Head and Shoulders shampoo and says, “But you don’t have dandruff.”
“Don’t you think that might be the problem?” I responded.
Despite our rule, the problem remained so pervasive that we moved the lunch period to the end of the day so that the students who took the exam before lunch couldn’t share the answers with those who took it after lunch.
By the second half of that first year, we seemed to have the issue under control, until we caught another student cheating. Two essays were almost identical word for word. As the papers had been written by students of different genders, we knew they couldn’t have worked together, so it had to be assumed that one of them had picked out the other’s paper from the teacher’s inbox, copied it, and put them both back. We brought the two students before a disciplinary panel to give us an oral recap of their paper. The panel now included students. In this case, Nimo was the student proctor. Clearly, the boy knew the material and the girl didn’t. It isn’t easy for a student to go against her peer, and I wanted Nimo to get a lesson out of this, too. At the end, I asked her opinion. She looked in pain while saying, “She couldn’t possibly have written that essay.” This was the girl’s second offense, so she was going to be expelled.
Now, with the new cheating scandal before us, Nimo is one of the culprits. Harry and I eventually piece it all together, and we are pretty sure that we’ve hit on the truth. The scandal started with a weak student breaking into the staff office to steal the exam, and then giving it to one of the most popular boys. What is fascinating is not the bold behavior but rather that the exam thief never bothered to look at it himself. He broke into the office and stole an exam, which are two huge disciplinary violations, and he didn’t even do it to improve his grade. He stole it to gain the approval of the cool kids, proving that some things are the same no matter where you go.
Like the cheating during History of Folk Music, the scandal started small with a few students. Others then joined in, some because they are followers, some wanting to be accepted, some feeling it is unfair if others benefit from cheating and they don’t, and some for their own quirky reasons. In Nimo’s case, I genuinely believe she hated that other girls were saying, “You better not tell Jonathan.” Even though she is a strong person and a noble person, she is also a teenager. In her prior school, she had few friends and barely spoke. Now, she had friends and didn’t want to risk losing them. I could live with Nimo still being a teenager. I could live with the followers. I could live with all of it so long as the students saw what they did, really thought about why they were wrong, and learned their
lesson. Integrity, like all lessons, would need practice. No one told me we were going to be handed finished products.
In fact, looking below the surface of the third-year cheating scandal, we found some silver linings. Most of the revelations concerned events that happened well in the past, and this was for a reason. Having participated a couple of times, many of the students, including Nimo, had already left the group of cheaters months before we discovered the scandal. Yes, they had participated, but they didn’t need a punishment or outside shame to knock it off. These students had already been stopped by their conscience, which shows me that they learned their lesson long before I was on the other side of the table questioning them, which is another reason that I recover so fast. My kids are growing up.
18
SUZANNE’S ORPHANAGE
Suzanne, a twenty-three-year-old graduate of George Washington University, extends her right arm and catches a twelve-year-old who suddenly dashed away. Her left arm is already holding on to another boy who bolted ten seconds before. Calmly, she walks them back to their seats on a nearby stoop. They are joined by three of their friends as Nimo thanks Suzanne for her help. All five of Nimo’s students return to the math problems she wrote on her movable whiteboard.
There are five such stations set up, each manned by an Abaarso student. But it is Suzanne who is in charge. She brought the Abaarso kids to the Hargeisa Orphanage today, as she does two other days each week. She is the one who keeps order, and while the orphans appreciate the student teachers, too, she’s the one they truly love. One of them knows Suzanne likes turtles, so he catches them for her, and eventually she has a collection. I see these children periodically and they always proudly brag, “Suzanne is my teacher!”
Abaarso had launched a community service/outreach program with the state-run orphanage in Hargeisa. The idea was to create a win-win situation—the children in the orphanage would get extra class time, and our students would feel empowered to create positive change. All students were required to perform four hours of community service each week, which helps them value the importance of giving back to others, but equally, prepares them for their future mission of caring for and building their community once they have completed their education. After a couple of years at Abaarso, our students are showing how much they have to offer their countrymen.
Suzanne is an English teacher at Abaarso, and she also serves as a college counselor to our students, so her plate is full. Still, three afternoons a week, she and a team of Abaarso students make the drive to the Hargeisa Orphanage. Nimo is just one of the students today, and her presence isn’t a surprise since she does three times the required community service. Her classmates are running similar stations in other spots in the orphanage courtyard. Suzanne and the kids have finished a day of Abaarso classes that started at seven a.m. Their last class ends at two p.m., they wolf down a quick lunch, and Suzanne gets them on the road by two thirty. With the drive time and setup, they won’t get back until after six.
The orphanage tutoring hasn’t always run this smoothly, not that any outsider who witnessed it would call this controlled chaos “smooth.” Abaarso students tutored here for a year prior to Suzanne’s arrival, but the program had been more disorganized and therefore not fulfilling for anyone. Programs don’t just work; they need serious management. Not that the program’s first director or the volunteer tutors were at fault. I hadn’t dedicated enough supervisory manpower, so after my Abaarso kids were dropped off at the orphanage, they were left to fend for themselves. They were completely overwhelmed. The orphans lacked discipline, so getting them to focus was no easy task, made all the more difficult because we were on their turf. With little leadership and little to show for their efforts, our students dreaded going. I feared the whole “orphanage tutoring” initiative might have been a mistake and considered shutting it down.
My pessimism about the program had deep roots. I had visited the Hargeisa Orphanage on my very first trip to Somaliland, back when I was touring the country. I had been surprised that the orphanage seemed to have only a couple hundred children, an incredibly small number for the primary orphanage in a war-ravaged city of three-quarters of a million people. At the time of my visit, I hadn’t realized that most of the country’s orphans had been taken in by relatives. Because of Somaliland’s strong clan system, Somalis take care of their own. So, when Somalis take care of their family, the term “family” casts a far wider net than it does in America. Somalis might bring home an orphaned child whose familial relation they couldn’t even explain beyond being in the same subclan. It is a great credit to the society that so few orphans were in this orphanage, but there was another side to that coin. The Somali children in this orphanage had absolutely no one. They were truly alone.
It was immediately clear that the orphanage lacked a loving touch, whether or not there were so-called caretakers. The rooms were barren, with no sheets on bare mattresses, and the children were filthy. At the time of my visit, I didn’t want to be judgmental. The Somali who took me saw no such need to hold back. “These kids smell,” she said. “Look at the bugs around them. Their clothes haven’t been washed in ages.” I can still picture one little girl, probably no older than three, whose clothes were sticking to her from being damp and soiled. When I visited the nursery, the smell was so putrid that I was physically repelled from the space. When was the last time those diapers were changed? Were there diapers at all?
A later visit contributed to my pessimism. My mother was visiting the country. I brought her to the orphanage to see the program at work. But the male worker at the gate didn’t even want to let us in. As we were talking and negotiating, a few of the little ones came over to see what was going on, at which point this worker took out a metal rod and hit them with it. These were little kids, and he was willing to strike them, even with my mother and me watching.
When Suzanne took over the orphanage tutoring she first had to convince me not to end the program. From what I had seen, our students hated going and it showed in their lack of commitment. I wondered if it was even possible to succeed in such a place. It isn’t easy to provide the only hours of sanity in the course of these children’s week. Just calming them enough to start the lesson was an almost impossible task.
All this made Suzanne’s success at the orphanage a complete miracle. The orphans were learning and wanted to come to the program each day. She begged me to let four of them take our entrance exam, and I agreed. When the scoring finished, her impact was clear. Suzanne’s kids were the best math students in the country.
Suzanne’s success came from getting our students to buy in. They needed to see what was possible, and Suzanne showed them. Her tenacity and patience were infectious, and the kids from the orphanage now dutifully followed her lead. Once committed, our students saw the change in these kids, both in their education and their happiness. As with any good teachers, they now took pride in their students’ achievement. It was their students who did great on the exam, their students being accepted to Abaarso. Our student teachers beamed with pride.
As a school community service program, something I’d thought was hopeless became a model of success. All sides have benefited, and with the orphans eventually enrolled at Abaarso, the fruits were constantly on display for everyone to see. While our students themselves came from humble circumstances, there was no denying that the plight of these orphanage kids was worse. Now these kids had hope for a bright future. It was a lesson in tenacity and compassion.
At the end of that year, Mubarik gave a speech to the students. “Orphanage tutoring used to be work. Everyone hated it,” he said. “Now I can see that it is the most respected activity anyone can do at Abaarso.”
That was the truth. To steal another phrase from Mubarik, the orphanage tutoring became a success “because somebody loved it.” Suzanne gave her heart to the place and the students followed. She had built a sustainable program in Somaliland that others would build upon in the years to come.
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sp; At the end of Suzanne’s last year, we hold a special “Fun Day” at Abaarso in which all the students are split into four teams. A teacher, one who would soon be leaving Abaarso, leads each group; Suzanne is among them. The teams compete against one another in a variety of competitions all over the campus. There are sports, public speaking matches, intellectual competitions, and board games … even Clue! The day ends with an “Apache Relay” in which the different teams need to make three-pointers, dig up large rocks, spell tough words, and go through a whole set of other tasks including eating half a watermelon with no hands. Amal rapidly performs this and then proceeds to throw up. The students are so excited that they don’t notice Suzanne constantly running back to her room, checking her messages. Her brother has been sick his whole life and now is critically ill.
I am refereeing a basketball game and Suzanne is on the court beyond me with girls from her team. I see Haibe, one of the Abaarso boys who tutors in the orphanage, running full speed from “Capture the Flag” on the opposite side of campus. He is heading straight for the court where Suzanne and her girls are playing and doesn’t even notice that he’s cut right through the basketball game. Normally, I’d be upset with a student for this kind of disrespect, but this time is different. In his full dash, Haibe keeps screaming out, “WE WON IT FOR YOU, SUZIE! WE WON IT FOR YOU!” It is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Suzanne has left her mark on the orphanage, and all those Abaarso students whose lives she touched. She’d showed so many people what it meant to truly care. It is all the more heartbreaking when later that day we learn that her brother has died.
It Takes a School Page 10