Free-falling through Africa

A guitar on the Tanzanian plains, and the kid smiles cheekily at me as the string he touches resonates like a screech. We are sat on the dirt floor of the rural school’s courtyard. All the other children are in the classrooms studying English, Mathematics, or reading, while these two peer shyly at me over the top of the oversized guitar.
They smile and look at my eyes like I’m a fish in a tank as I lean over and show them which strings are the correct to pluck. The kid nods and hits the wrong note again. The trees are growing purple flowers and the horizon is flat, lined with pale shades of yellow and green. There is silence surrounding the sound of the guitar, just me and these two kids.
When the girl takes her turn at the instrument, she looks at me before placing her hands on the neck and plucking three of the right notes in a row. I congratulate her in English, and she understands my face and nods at me with a timid smile.
Later that day, after we have finished teaching classes at the school, and after we have finished helping to fix the water hole which the elephants ruined last week, recess will occur. The kids will come rushing out of the 5 classrooms and run around the courtyard, run around us. About 40 of them will gather around me and sing along to my guitar playing, in a language neither of us truly know how to speak; “Samina, mina, eh, eh, waka, waka, eh, eh…” and they will take their turn at grabbing the guitar from me, scratching its strings, before handing it back so that we can sing again. They’ll dance around me in circles and knots before the bell goes and they take their time at getting back into the building.
This will happen in a rush, and will be over too quickly. For now I am sat on the floor and the girl giggles as the boy tries to play the guitar at the same time as her: two-man guitar playing. They’ve never touched a guitar before, or been friendly with a white person, had a conversation in nothing but English, or had classes to do with art and music. She looks expectantly at me and I laugh back at the song which is now ringing through the air: mismatched, out of sync, funny. The dirt under me suddenly feels unmeasurably comforting, and music never sounded so soothing, with the plains surrounding us, vast and empty, like we’ll never leave.