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I asked my ninth-grade students to write, in English, an excuse note explaining why they hadn’t done a hypothetical homework assignment. (This is their third year of English and their second year with me.) Here are some highlights. Translations of French words are in brackets.

…

I am malaria, flu, cholera, after three day I am dead.

I don’t bring my copy because that day, the stolers have stolen my bag. My copy was in the bag. And then my pens, books, copybook [=notebook], clothes were in the bag. The stolers have hit me and I have away. The policemen have been come there, It is why I gave my copy. I lost everything in the bag. Then I drink the sodabi [moonshine].

My dog eat the copybook.

My sister take my copy to the WC [latrine] she want to chier [shit] with it.

It is a one day I want to do a travel. After I’m finish to leave, I am goes to see my driver to give a Parakou [a city]. The driver is say Okay. The driver is take me. I looked the window I say at my friend to come get in the window of the car. I go to not sleep under a mosquito net I am catch malaria. My mother is say to go at hospital. The doctor is say the medicine is finish. I am angry.

I am enough work.

I don’t do last paragraph because I am lazy student, and when I studie English I was sleep, so I am understand English to speak but to write I have the serious problèmes [problems].

My friend is stole my wife. I go to sorcier [witch-doctor]. I give him the money. Next week I see my wife.

I did not write the paragraph because the Saturday, my father has said to go at field for to work. I have gone to work some morning to evening. I have come at home all tired and I had a headache because the sun has hitted too much on my head.

My father will talk me to going at the field. My mother want for me go to school for become the Président Barack Obama.

Sometime, I smell the sorrow in my body. I have many tired, I suffer the head ache and I have difficulty for mating. So, I must sleep under musketeer [an attempt at moustiquaire, meaning “mosquito net”] because the malaria can kill the man in the life.

I have a sore throat. I have no appetite. I feel very tired. I have no money for go to hospital. My is no happy.

—————

Before much else you notice the children. Half of Benin’s population is under 14, as with many other African countries: it is a continent of children. Children raise crops and bring them to market. Children herd and slaughter cattle. Children bring water from the well. Children fight wars. Children raise other children.

They act as parents toward each other. A four–year–old watches, protects, and disciplines a two–year–old, and a six–year–old does the same for four–year–old, and an eight–year–old for a six–year–old. One time two little boys started sword–fighting with sticks in my living room. A seven–year–old girl calmly walked between them, took the sticks and set them against the wall, and shepherded them outside.

They don’t have the carefree childhood that Americans idealize, but they learn early on a sense of responsibility and authority and justice: a first–grader has to resolve conflicts and then decide on and enforce punishment. In my large classes I can’t see everything that goes on, and often a student will come to me and say something like, “Reine stole Merveille’s pencil, because Merveille said she was ugly. You should give them both two hours of detention.” It threw me at first, because it’s so different from how American children behave, but I learned that this is completely normal. It’s what they do at home every day.

The children who live near me like to come over to look at picture books or old magazines. National Geographic is their favorite. They also like looking through the Economist, trying to find all the pictures of Obama. I had a coloring book for a while, the first they’d ever seen, until they colored all the pages and taped them to my wall. Then they took to drawing on blank pieces of paper—pictures of themselves, their siblings, their houses, wells, trees, goats.

Children are never encouraged to draw or otherwise do any creative activity. When they aren’t at school memorizing and regurgitating information, they’re sweeping or cooking or working on the farm. But I never have to explain to a three–year–old how to color or draw a picture. You give them the crayon and paper and they just do it. By the time they’re thirteen and in my class at school, that instinct has been beaten out of them. They can’t copy a stick figure or a smiley face from the board without Herculean effort, because what they copy might be slightly different from what I drew. They can hardly produce an original sentence.

A lot happens when a child sits down to draw a picture. He’s thinking about his world: imagining it, interpreting it, re-inventing it. He learns to look at things not as he’s told to view them, but as he himself views them. When he grows up, that habit of mind will stay with him.

That is, I think, at the heart of rural Africa’s stagnation and backwardness. A child who loses his creativity and curiosity grows up to be an adult imprisoned in the mental landscape of his parents and grandparents, unable to imagine a new way of doing things or a new set of values by which to measure his world.

—————

Last August electricity came to my village. No one had bought meters for their houses yet, but every evening about a dozen streetlights lit up. We had advanced a bit toward joining the early twentieth century.

In September the village’s transformer blew up. Its blackened shell is still sitting there, and we are back in the dark.

What happened was this. The poles and wires and whatnot have been going up since I got here in September 2010. In April a French electrician came and installed the transformer. The local government promptly removed that transformer and substituted a smaller one. The smaller transformer obviously could not handle the electricity for the whole village—even when it only needed to power the streetlights—and it blew up. The local government called up the French electrician and he came back. They demanded that he replace the transformer, the one they had put in place of the one he’d installed, for free. He obviously refused. And here we are, four months later, and the blown-up transformer is still here too.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think it’s safe to say that some officials sold the larger transformer and pocketed the money. They don’t care about exploding transformers—they all have the money to run personal generators at their houses. So it goes in Africa.

—————

While visiting California over Christmas, I went with my family to a Christmas Eve service at a megachurch. They held services in a top–flight auditorium that could probably seat the entire population of my village. In the course of the service they had stage fog, obviously, and a massive backdrop of thousands of winking lights, and they lowered a piano and a bass drum onto the stage.

The songs were mostly of the “Jingle Bells” variety. They at one point began singing the refrain to Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.” The refrain consists of repeating the word “Hallelujah.” They didn’t go any farther than that, because the song’s lyrics actually mean something and singing them may have inspired in some audience members that dread thing, thought.

And the effect of all the flashing lights and fog and crashing music is to banish thought and reflection from the room. Sitting in a candlelit sanctuary while a choir slowly moves through “O Holy Night” is a kind of peace you rarely find in the outside world. It gives you space to think and to feel. Truth of any kind, and a sense of right and wrong, do not exist in soundbites and shiny objects. You need to think for longer than 30 seconds to contemplate them.

I’m reminded of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s short stories where the government abolishes intelligence, on the grounds that it is undemocratic, by making people wear earbuds that make a loud noise every 30 seconds, cutting short any thought they might have been having.

Despite this I managed to get a few thoughts in during the service. The money it took to build this structure, I thought, is probably several times the combined wealth of my village. The money for all the shiny lights and stage fog and piano–lowering and whatnot could probably have paid the school tuition of every girl in the village. It could have paid for a lot of things.

I don’t think that simply throwing money at Africa will solve anything. But you need to have perspective and a sense of humility about this kind of thing. The fact that some people have a lot of money and opportunity while others have nothing may be the greatest evil in the world, both in itself and in all the other evils it causes. It’s never going away, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel comfortable with it. Throwing money away like that is a vivid way of saying that you are comfortable with it, and that you don’t give a damn.

If you’re a Christian, you believe that God sent his son here through an impoverished, illiterate couple, members of an oppressed ethnic group in a backwards corner of the world, and that is what you are supposedly celebrating on Christmas. If it weren’t for all the flashy lights and bombastic renditions of “Jingle Bells” bouncing around in your head, you might remember that today’s Josephs and Marys will never set foot in a megachurch.