Physics teacher Paul Mollinger occasionally walks into his classroom, looks around and thinks to himself, “Oh I haven’t seen a chicken today. Where’d the chickens go?”
To Mollinger, goats and chickens in classrooms were normal six months ago.
Before coming to CHS, Mollinger was a teacher for the Peace Corps and taught in a small village in Kenya. While learning the language of the Deluo people, he taught chemistry, physics and mathematics to all grade levels.
“The classrooms are small and they have an average of 60 students in every class,” he said. “There’s one class for freshman, sophomore, juniors, up to seniors. The teachers move, the kids stay.”
After being a chemical engineer and a part of an international chemical company for 35 years, he decided he wanted to teach, so he taught at an inner city school in Memphis, Tennessee. It was there where he learned about the Peace Corps recruitment.
“It’s something I had wanted to do since I got out of school, way back in the early 70s, but never did,” Mollinger said. “It brought a lot of memories back and ambitions and desires back, so next thing I know, I applied and seven months later I found myself in Kenya as a teacher for the United States Peace Corps.”
The first few days were strange for him as he saw students carrying their goats and chickens around.
“They served a very useful purpose, they kept the snakes away,” he said. “Once you learned that they kept the snakes away, you were fine with it. Every now and then, a bold snake would enter a classroom but they would always enter through the ceiling above, and whenever I saw students look up, that meant that there was a snake coming across. The first time I saw it, the students would laugh at my reaction. After a while, it was no big deal. Second time, it was strange, the third time it was normal.”
The goats and chickens also kept away snakes when the students walked to school in the early morning.
“They would walk eight kilometers in the dark because they would have to be in school by 7,” he said. “They usually wouldn’t leave the school until 5. They would get home about dark too.”
Once students got home, they would have to study under candle light or kerosene lamps. To help out, Mollinger started a project and teamed up with an agency in San Francisco who donated 1000 solar lamps.
“I distributed those throughout the village and that was a big improvement in a lot of people’s lives,” Mollinger said. “And so in the morning you would see the students carry their solar lamps, they’d put them on the roof of the school building, so they could get charged, and then they would take them back and they had about eight hours of light.”
Along with this project, Mollinger also undertook cooking as a job. Because the Deluo people were focused on survival, they did not take too much time with preparing the food.
“All they would do with the meat was cook it over super high temperature fire, and it was tough,” he said. “Now they thought it was good because it was a treat, but I taught them how to marinate. You could get oranges, there was an orange tree and a banana tree right outside of my hut. That’s acidic, like vinegar, and even when I went to the city, I could get vinegar and other things. I taught them how to marinate, cook slow and they were amazed at how tender you could make food.”
Although he enjoyed teaching them new concepts, he does not believe in imposing American culture on them.
“Our culture is different but it isn’t better,” he said. “One thing you have to be careful about when you go to a different culture, and I think Americans in particular, we think everyone wants to have an American culture. And that’s not really true. What you have to realize is that their culture is not a failed attempt in becoming our culture. It’s their culture, and I adapted that. I’ve brought back many habits from there, but it was fun to share some of their luxuries because we have the luxuries of time that they don’t have.”
If anything, he feels that he has learned more than taught from this experience.
“To this day, I’m still partially Kenyan in the way I live,” he said. “I don’t waste as much as I did before and I don’t have as many possessions as I had before.”
Although he does not plan on making it an extended stay, Mollinger hopes to go back and visit his village to see how everyone is doing.
“I’d also like to see how some of the projects are initiating,” Mollinger said. “We built a mammoth greenhouse, we installed solar panels. You always wonder, is it still working?”
As for the Peace Corps, he would love to do it again because it exposed him to global ideas he had never experienced before.
“This time I’d like to do it in South America or Latin America,” he said, “partly because it’s in the same time zone as the US, and that makes it a little bit easier to communicate with family. But I highly recommend Peace Corps to anyone because you do become a global educator.”