To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  So I did not ask students how they “felt” about a problem. I didn’t need to know their views.

  My notes didn’t even require updating since most of the problems I taught were solved decades, in some cases centuries, ago.

  Here is what a chalkboard would look like after one of my typical lectures:

  The problem solved on that chalkboard hasn’t changed in centuries. Galileo solved it first, four hundred years ago, probably scraping the formulas out in the dirt with his sandal.

  What all this meant is that I could turn my back on the students and work at the chalkboard for fifty minutes at a stretch while they diligently scratched out the symbols and methods in their notebooks. Every eight weeks I would pass out a test and ask them to solve variations of the very problems I’d been solving at the board. I could even make the tests multiple choice to keep the time I spent grading to a minimum.

  Mechanical, sterile, and with assembly-line efficiency, all students had to do was listen and learn.

  Given that impersonal style, there would be no trouble with me scheduling a climb or two each year. I could ask a colleague to fill in on occasion; perhaps I might even assign students some work to do on their own in my absence. I would make sure that my teaching schedule wouldn’t hold me back.

  My first stop would be Tanzania, in East Africa, to climb Kilimanjaro. As it turned out, the climb went every bit as smoothly as I’d planned, so much so that it was completely uneventful.

  The Masai warriors I met, on the other hand, were an entanglement.

  I crouch down to fit inside the tiny hut made of cow dung and sticks. Once inside, Kilembu offers me a hollowed-out calabash that contains the morning meal: a mixture of cow’s blood and milk. Somewhere outside, nearby, are the remains of a village elder who was found dead, dragged out of town, and left for hyenas to devour.

  Kilembu picks up his spear, and we crawl back outside. He wears only a red blanket and a pair of sandals that he’s fashioned out of a piece of car tire. He introduces me to the key elements of his world, in descending order of importance: two dozen cattle, a few goats, four children, three tiny huts, two wives, a mother. After all the introductions, he takes me back to his cattle for one last look. The cattle are the center of his life. Kilembu lives the typical life of a Masai warrior.

  We walk up the hill that rises above the village of Longido. From the top we can see dozens of miles across the African savanna. Kilembu extends his spear out flat to his side, then slowly swings it in front of him.

  “All Masai,” he says proudly, as his spear traverses the entire length of the horizon.

  Yes, as far as the eye can see, this is Masai country. All Kilembu has ever seen is Masai country; he has never stepped a foot beyond it. So far, neither have his children.

  Masai are the native tribesmen of Kenya and Tanzania, perhaps as many as a million in number. Despite contact with modern civilization, the vast majority of tribesmen have maintained their centuries-old nomadic life.

  Kilembu ends our walk at the home of Estomii Molell, a Masai elder. I duck out of the midday sun and into his dimly lit hut. On the floor, with his arms twisted like corkscrews, lies the paralyzed frame of this village elder. A Masai warrior stands at his side, brushing away flies.

  “I want you to know, we are not dirty here,” Estomii says. He speaks emphatically, anticipating criticism.

  “There is no extra water for washing. When a woman travels fifteen kilometers to get water, and you ask her for some water to wash, what do you think she’ll say?”

  The point made, his face relaxes. He wants me to understand his people. So he starts by talking about mine.

  He says he knows the United States. He knows of its phones and its computers and its big roads.

  “Why would we want that?” he asks.

  He dismisses all of our modern technological infrastructure with a laugh. “Here we walk and we see people. In the West, you call and you never see.”

  He explains that our sophisticated telecommunications have left us isolated: “In your country, people have everything but company.

  “I went to Germany and stayed with a family,” Estomii continues, “and you know the conversation over breakfast? ‘Pass the sugar.’ And over dinner? ‘Pass the salt.’” Estomii chuckles. “I asked this man, ‘What is your neighbor doing?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Estomii shakes his head in wonder. “In Masai country, you cannot say, ‘That is not my business.’” He illustrates his point. “If a boy cringes when he is circumcised, everyone will know the next day. He will never be respected.”

  Estomii pauses, a chance for a question. I ask about crime.

  “Yes, we do have killing here,” he says gravely. “A Masai killed a Masai here in 1961. It has happened again this month.”

  He falls quiet; he is embarrassed by what he thinks is a large number of murders. I’m surprised, because I know what a low number it truly is. In my hometown of Washington, D.C., we were suffering from three murders every week.

  “The family of the dead man dragged the body outside the village and left it for the hyenas. Then they demanded the other man pay forty-nine cows. He paid; he is now accepted back.”

  I’m shocked. “Isn’t anyone worried that he might kill again?” I ask.

  “No,” Estomii says, confused by my question. “That would cost him 189 cows, and he can’t afford that.”

  I’m so stunned by this notion of justice that all I can think to ask is how they determine the number of cows. Estomii says the number varies, but “there must always be a nine”—49, 189, 199. This doesn’t clarify anything. I ask, “Why nine?”

  He explains: “The nine orifices. A murdered man has been stripped of life from his nine orifices, and that must be repaid.”

  I stop our conversation to count. When I look back up, Estomii has fallen asleep. His warrior motions for me to leave. As I walk out the door, I notice the warrior’s spear leaning against the wall.

  Once a week, Masai come from as far as twenty miles away to trade at the makeshift market. Seventy or eighty warriors gather around a pen to trade cattle. No one is buying, few are talking, all look proud. I go look for some shade and stumble across Mwarimbo.

  He’s built like a Masai—tall, lean, and fit, with an expressive face—but that’s where the similarity ends. He is not Masai. He wears pants, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and sneakers; he asks me to call him “Johnson.” He is a teacher at the Longido Secondary School.

  “What subject?” I ask.

  “Science.”

  I’m relieved. Finally, I’ve met someone I can relate to. We start strolling in the direction of his school.

  In Tanzania, primary school is free. The primary schools in this part of the country put sixty children into a classroom. The next four years of education make up secondary school—roughly equivalent to our high school—and it must be paid for by the family. The quality of education is much higher, the benefits seem clear, and yet very few Masai children attend secondary school. It’s the father’s decision and, for many, education comes at too high a cost.

  “At $120 a year, it would mean selling a cow to get a child through secondary school,” Johnson explains. But the Masai seem to have plenty of cows to spare, I observe.

  Johnson shakes his head. “You don’t understand the problem.”

  The vast majority of Masai men consider education “trouble,” he says. “When a girl completes secondary school, she realizes she is more valuable than a cow.” That’s trouble. Warriors start to define their place in society when they marry and receive a dowry of cattle. They take three wives, get three dowries, start amassing a herd. So educating girls threatens the cattle business; it threatens the Masai way of life. To Masai warriors, education is a raw deal.

  We’ve walked across the savanna for nearly an hour when we reach the cinder block school.

  “All they think about is cattle,” Johnson continues, barely controlling his anger. He is
determined to do whatever it takes to break the Masai of their bond to cattle and to give the children an education.

  He explains his method. It is extreme, but as a scientist I appreciate its efficacy.

  Johnson’s first law: “Masai are not allowed to wear their traditional clothes in this school.” Second, they are addressed only by Western names that they are given, not their Masai names. Third, in addition to that initial cultural stripping, Johnson takes a final intense step: all Masai students board at his school. They are not allowed to return home until the school year has finished.

  The first thing students learn is that raising cattle, which graze on whatever grows on the savanna, is not a sustainable livelihood. “Agriculture is inevitable,” Johnson declares.

  Through science courses, students learn basic principles of farming, irrigation, and how to combat drought. They learn about basic medical care and vaccinations; inconceivably, the country is still fighting polio.

  But not everything they are taught is so practical. Johnson speaks with zeal about the simple excitement of learning. He wants children to identify with a larger world, a world I have largely ignored.

  Before I leave the school, Johnson introduces me to Anna and Susanna. They are Masai, but I never learn their Masai names. They wear skirts and blouses, socks and dress shoes. They speak only a few words of English, but they seem eager to try. We chat for a few minutes. When I say goodbye, they say it was a pleasure to meet me—a verbal curtsy. As they walk away, Johnson explains that they will be leaving the school after only one year here because their father will not pay. According to Johnson, the children want to stay.

  The next morning I return to Estomii’s hut. I tell him about Johnson, about the school. I ask his opinion of modern education.

  “Let me tell you about one of the best brains in Tanzania. Very brilliant with mathematics. He went to Britain to study aircraft design. He came back, and you know what? We don’t design airplanes here.” Estomii chuckles. “He is still looking for a job.”

  His warmth has drawn me into the story; we’re both laughing as he delivers the clincher: “He is useless.”

  Estomii adds: “This Johnson is a fool. He is not Masai; he does not understand. Without cattle, Masai have no identity.”

  Estomii points out that a truly competent teacher would be able to educate children no matter what clothes they wear. “Besides, their clothes are practical. It is hot here, why wear pants?”

  As he launches into a bitter criticism of Johnson, I tune out and watch the warrior looking after Estomii brush away flies. Estomii has already made his point. He is engaged in a battle, the only battle that a paralyzed old man with twisted arms and a fading voice can still fight. He fights for his tribe’s identity. With a quick mind and a passionate heart, he fights for what it means to be Masai.

  I returned to the United States a few days later. Having been gone for several weeks, I knew that I would have mail waiting for me, a pile of bills that needed to be paid. Efficiency dictated that my first stop should be the post office.

  “I’m here to pick up the mail I put on hold,” I explain to the postal worker. I pull my driver’s license out of my wallet.

  She glances at the ID and walks into the back and comes back a few minutes later empty-handed. “No mail.”

  “What? That’s not possible. I’ve been gone for over a month. Of course I have mail. Phone bill, gas bill, credit cards. Did you check the right address?”

  “No mail.” And no discussion, apparently.

  “Look, you know that I have mail. I get mail every day and it’s been more than a month. Where the hell is my mail?” I don’t like her manner and now she doesn’t like mine.

  She stares at me without saying a word.

  I yell, I slam my fist down on the counter, I curse at her. She stares at me, expressionless. Nothing I say is going to get her to turn around and walk back into that room and search for my mail.

  “There’s no mail. You can leave now.” She turns her back on me and sits down at a desk. I hurl a couple more insults at her: she is lying, she is too lazy to go back and look for my mail. I say all this while staring at her back. “Goodbye,” she calls over her shoulder.

  I storm out of the post office.

  A few days later I found out what happened to my mail.

  The D.C. postal carriers had gotten so far behind in delivery that they were dumping mail into trucks that were parked behind the central post office. Hundreds of thousands of letters, bills, and packages were getting tossed into the semis. Most D.C. residents weren’t affected; others wouldn’t even notice that a letter wasn’t delivered that week. In my case, since I happened to be gone for so long, they had apparently taken my entire pile and dumped it into the truck.

  All this came out in a newspaper story. The head of the local post office was quoted as apologetic, vowed it would never happen again, and was appropriately remorseful. That didn’t do me any good. I wanted my mail. How could I get it?

  The head of the post office explained that the trucks were so jammed with mail that they couldn’t go back now and deliver it all, because they would just fall hopelessly behind in delivering the current mail. He proposed a solution. Anyone who believed that their mail was tossed out could come down to the central post office and search the trucks.

  Search the trucks? My mail was as good as buried. I had to let it go.

  Then I thought back to the postal worker I had berated for not finding my mail. She had been right. There was no mail for me in her back room; it had never gotten there. There was nothing for her to find because it was buried in the back of a truck at the central office.

  There was a message in this that went beyond my mail. There was something about her manner: the dismissiveness, the minimal communication, the detachment. I had witnessed my own teaching style. That was the very way I treated students in my classroom.

  She had simply stated the facts, there was no need for discussion, no need to consider my opinion or how I “felt.” She had turned her back on me without care. Mechanical, sterile, no wasted words, efficient.

  I had looked in a mirror. But it would take years before that reflection sank in.

  I made phone calls to the utilities and the credit card company and paid my last bill. My checkbook was still open on the table when I thought back to Johnson and Tanzania.

  With some additional money, he could keep Anna and Susanna at school. Without the money, their education ends and they go back to a life in the bush.

  No one asked me for the money; no one told me not to give it either. I was drawn into the battle, and I could choose to arm one side. Estomii or Johnson? Masai or the scientific modern world?

  I picked up a pen and wrote a check to the Longido Secondary School. It wasn’t because I cared about these people—Anna or Susanna or Johnson. Rather, I did it to validate my own point of view. Johnson was a practitioner of the scientific method. That, I believed, was my identity.

  Then, I turned on my computer and wrote the story of Estomii, Johnson, and me for an educational journal. I laid it all out: my disregard for Estomii, my sympathy for Johnson, and how I could relate to his stiff teaching methods. I concluded the article explaining that I wrote a check that would keep Anna and Susanna in school, apart from their families. I thought the readers would understand my decision. I was wrong.

  Readers found me self-absorbed, insensitive, and disconnected.

  Cold and broken was the consensus.

  I neither disagreed with those criticisms nor apologized. The fact is, they were accurate.

  Self-absorbed? Yes, I admit it. That’s why I let Pax climb down El Cap and mangle his feet, never offering him an assist.

  Cold? Insensitive? I remember thinking at the time: what’s wrong with that? Insensitivity can come in handy, depending on how you live your life. It was probably the very thing that fortified Warren Harding, kept him pursuing El Cap despite all odds being against him. And I knew from my own experienc
e that being insensitive can get you back on your feet, even if you have a corkscrew break running down your fibula.

  Disconnected? Certainly. And why not? I was independent. I wasn’t connected to others and they weren’t connected to me. The world was a place to play and work, nothing more.

  I had no intention of changing. I could even add a few more things to the list that I knew would never change, three pillars that formed my foundation.

  Pillar #1: I would never get married.

  Relationships were little more than ways to fill the evenings. I’m sure that the women I went out with all recognized this within a date or two. Fortunately, some of them were gracious enough to tolerate me for longer than that.

  Pillar #2: I would never buy a house.

  A home would create permanence. It would make me a fixed point on a map, pinned down and limited. That could only lead to complacency and, what I dreaded most, stagnation.

  Pillar #3: I would never have kids.

  Opting to have children was the ultimate limiting decision. In doing that, I would have to live for someone else and I had no intention of ever letting that happen.

  And so I ignored what lessons there were to be learned from the comments of the readers of that educational journal. My teaching, my relationships, my identity were all challenged and I should have carried out a little self-reflection. But I didn’t, because I didn’t care. If I had concluded anything from writing that article, it was this: ignore the world and stay focused. I decided that I would never write about my travels again. I went back to the To Do List.