The Future

Anyone who has worked with teenagers knows how hard it is to get youth to think about the future and the impact their decisions will have on their lives. Here in Africa it is no different. By the end of the year, 10 of our students will be parents. Our school director wanted to know if any of our youth activists were amongst the shameful bunch, luckily the answer was no, even though the leader of one of our youth groups does have a son from a bad decision he made a couple years ago. Given the spat of pregnancies, we got our young activists to perform their play about not having sex for the entire morning high school. Everyone was entertained, but it is unclear how receptive they are to the message. The play concluded with Luc telling the entire school that students should be studying, not making babies, and that anyone not ready to be a mom or dad should not be having sex, especially since they don’t even have enough self-discipline to use condoms despite the high HIV-prevalence and barrage of public health campaigns. Our fellow teachers were laughing just as much as the students and explained it’s only a problem when the female students have sex, so we should just focus on them and not worry about the boys. We obviously still have a ways to go here. We were asking our houseboy Romão about his future, but the very concept just baffled him. “Do you want to have kids in the future?” we asked him. “No, I am just a youth,” he responded. “No, in the future, when you are an adult,” we explained, but he clearly had trouble conceptualizing it, saying, “But I am not in the future.” Janet introduced the future tense in French this week, and taught professions so that her students can make phrases like “I will be a baker” and “You will be a teacher.” The form is exactly the same as in Portuguese, but the kids still struggled with it. And many of them are only familiar with the professions they see here in town, like border guard, customs agent and nurse. When Janet wrote lawyer, butcher, secretary, and banker on the board, the kids didn’t know what they were and Janet had to explain that these are jobs one might have in the city. We hiked up our mountain last weekend with a couple of friends, and found several logger camps on top, cutting down the old-growth trees of the cloud forest in the caldera. On previous trips up, we’ve heard monkeys, been mesmerized by the chirping of unique bird species and cooled by the shaded canopy. This trip we found only 6 or so of the giants still standing, exposing the plants underneath to the hot sun. Janet almost cried and hugged several of the stumps. If the loggers are at all like our students, then they haven’t contemplated what they’ll do next year when there are zero trees left. Growing up in a society that values accumulation, investment and planning it is difficult to live somewhere that focuses only on immediate consumption with little thought for tomorrow, let alone next year or next century. We encourage our students to dream big, make plans and think about what steps they will need to accomplish in order to reach their goals, but it feels sometimes like we’re the presidents of some sort of unpopular Glee “Chastity Club.”