By Rod Hansen
Staff Writer

Goffstown News/Rod Hansen Andy Caulton, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Mountain View Middle School, with a student’s project on the Nyumbani Children’s Home in Nairobi, Kenya.

The sounds and language of the Congolese jungle erupted on a hillside in town earlier this month.

Seventh-grade social studies teacher Andy Caulton, finishing up a 26-mile marathon from Amherst, ascended the hill to Mountain View Middle School with a throng of students following behind. And together, everyone chanted the words Caulton had been saying to himself throughout his three-hour run: “N’zoto emoto ezali makasi!”

“Grown men don’t cry,” the words say when translated into English. It’s a Pygmy chant, and one that dovetails perfectly with Caulton’s reasons for running the marathon.

Caulton ran the marathon to raise funds for Nyumbani Children’s Home, an AIDS orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. A native of England who has been teaching at Mountain View for three years, Caulton said he will run to support Nyumbani every year for as long as he can. To make the date of his marathon easy to remember, Caulton said he plans to run it every year on his April 8 birthday, or on the closest available weekday.

This year, Caulton’s run to benefit Nyumbani commemorated his 44th birthday.

Caulton first heard about Nyumbani from Judy Pancoast, a local children’s musician who was planning a visit to the orphanage in April 2005.

Pancoast spoke to Caulton’s students about the children in the orphanage, and Caulton’s students assembled a gift basket for Pancoast to bring.

All of the children in Nyumbani are AIDS patients, and almost all have lost parents and other family members to AIDS.

The videotape Pancoast filmed during her visit showed the joy of receiving gifts knows no cultural boundaries. The children of the Nyumbani Children’s Home were visibly thrilled by the gifts from Caulton’s students. One of the African orphans donned a New England Patriots cap, while others delightedly paged through the Rugrats ephemera and Barbie dolls Caulton’s class had sent.

“The children at Nyumbani are pretty isolated from the world, so they love anything from America. You could tell by watching them play with their gifts and read the books how much it all meant to them,” Pancoast said.

The children in this video suddenly didn’t seem so foreign, a realization made all the more poignant by knowing that some of these children were doomed to die of AIDS.

“The things that Andy’s class sent to Nyumbani was really the greatest gifts you could imagine,” Pancoast said.

More information about the Nyumbani Children’s Home is available at www.nyumbani.org.

Caulton said he teaches about AIDS in Africa as part of his social studies classes, which focus on Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as well as Africa.

Because AIDS has become so prevalent in Africa, Caulton said the disease is a necessary part of studying the continent.

“I figured if I was going to teach anything about Africa, AIDS would have to be a part of it,” Caulton said.

Although many of Caulton’s students have lived in Goffstown for generations, they show a distinct interest in learning about other parts of the world, Caulton said.

“I’m amazed at the connection students have with other cultures around the world,” Caulton said. “They’re like sponges. They absorb culture and are fascinated by it.”

Caulton said he had students ascend the hill with him at the conclusion of his marathon so the youths could feel closer to the cause, and to the children of Nyumbani.

The idea of running a marathon for a good cause continues a tradition Caulton began last year, when Caulton and Assistant Principal Fred Deppe ran a marathon in support of Brandon Tardiff, a Mountain View student who is a cancer patient.

This year, to benefit Nyumbani, Caulton collected sponsorships from family, friends and students. To train, Caulton said he ran 10-mile jaunts in the weekends leading up to the marathon. Although Caulton has run marathons in the past, he said it’s often difficult to find time to train while taking care of his young daughters Izzie, who will be 3 in May, and 8-monthold Greta, with his wife, Lisa.

“They’re very busy,” Caulton says with a laugh about his daughters, whom he takes to the YMCA four times a week.

When it came time to run the marathon this year, Caulton set out at 4:45 a.m. a few days before his birthday (which fell on a Saturday this year), planning his arrival at Mountain View to coincide with the school’s 8:30 a.m. opening.

Jogging by himself so early in the morning, Caulton said he enjoyed the solitude of the countryside rather than the bustle of a big-city marathon.

“To me, running isn’t about being with thousands of other people. It’s about listening to the birds and looking up at the stars,” he said, noting that he had placed drinks strategically along his route for refreshment.

And although a 26.2-mile run is a grueling chore by definition, Caulton said completion was a simple case of mind over matter.

And to draw himself toward the finish line, Caulton had his simple chant to fall back on: “N’zoto emoto ezali makasi!”