Three boys learning English
A boy called Winter used to come to the house for help with English. He was about 17, shy and awkward. I liked him, because I felt that he wanted to learn, and I thought he was capable of it, too. I used to like imagining all this potential around that I could help mould into something more useful.
His situation was not at all uncommon: if he's in Grade 7 now, that means he will be how old when he reaches Grade 12? Much older than 18, the age you're supposed to be. His childhood had been repeatedly interrupted. I also used to teach his sister who was about 8 years old, in the local primary school. She would miss whole days because she had to wash clothes. My neighbour had missed a year or two because his mother had fallen ill and he had had to sell fritters on the street to pay for her medicine. Stories like Winter's quickly became typical, and when he told me his I was past being shocked, but was choked anew by the now familiar frustration that made me grind my teeth and dig my nails into my palms before, like him, I pretended there was no problem, we'll just see what we can do about it now. I helped him prepare for the end of year test, to determine whether he could progress in school, or would be repeating a year, pushing his finishing age up even further.
One morning, I was having a private class with Winter at the house, when half way through another boy turns up and sits confidently down at the table, which surprises me because previously all the kids who’ve been here to see Mrs. Mfula, the woman with whom I was living, have lingered nervously on the porch, usually for a long time, while they wait for her to finish her food, or her conversation with me, or to return home if she’s out. I guess that this smart young boy must be about 15, he obviously knows Winter and they share a joke together in the local language. I can’t imagine he’s here for class, but I don’t see why else he would be sitting at this table.
“Are you here to learn?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, looking right at me.
What else can I do but to get him a book and a pencil?
“Here you are”, I say handing it over.
I’m annoyed, because I don’t want to be interrupted. He looks much too smart and clean, and seems too cocky, to really warrant wasting the time I want to use helping someone who’s actually “in need”. After all, Winter is in tatty clothes, and has clearly come through the water to get here; there is no mistaking him for anything but poor. I decide quickly that he can’t possibly live in the same compound as Winter.
While I was fetching the book and pencil, another boy had arrived. This one has the mannerisms of Winter, and hovers around the table before I tell him to sit down.
“Are you here to learn?”
“Yes”, he whispers, and I go back to my room to fetch another book and pencil, more irritated again. Winter and I were making good progress, the last thing I want is for his friends to come along and turn this into some sort of youth club.
I ask them their names. The smart boy has already written “Haggai”, the same name as the boy who helped us with the roof repair of a widow just yesterday. But it surely can't be him, as he was scruffy and didn’t chat like this one; he was sponsored by Mrs Mfula to go to school, and this kid is clearly in no need of sponsorship. He probably lives in a house with his employed parents and goes to a good school. I even start to wonder if he’s here to take advantage of a free lesson, maybe sent by his thrifty father who could afford a private tutor but why pay if you can get it for free?
Webster doesn’t understand the question, and Haggai jumps in to explain. I turn back to Winter, but Webster is still lost, and I quickly realize that he can’t write. Haggai is telling him the letters but it means nothing to him. Not unkindly, Haggai takes the book and writes it for him. Webster is hardly moving, and certainly not about to look at me.
To Winter and Haggai, I give the next task. Write what you like doing. What you like doing. So start with ‘I like’, I point to the page, start with ‘I like’. Winter nods. Haggai sighs loudly, looking exasperated at the blank page in his new book (where at some point during the writing of Webster’s name he’d managed to write the day and the date neatly in the corner).
Winter and I look at him questioningly.
“I know how to write I like. I’m in Grade 8, OK?” he says, looking at me with eye contact that no other pupil has managed. “Give me something harder.”
So I ask him what an adjective is. He doesn’t know. I ask him to spell it but he doesn’t manage. He scribbles it down lightly and then spells it for me, missing out the ‘d’. After writing the word correctly, I explain the meaning and ask him to write down all the adjectives he can think of. That should keep him busy for a while. Sure enough he concentrates hard and starts writing.
I set the work for Winter and then write a sentence for Webster to copy. He looks at me. He hasn’t understood. Haggai looks up and with one word explains what he needs to do. A tiny nod from Webster and he gets on with it. It seems like I should be annoyed by this, as everything else Haggai has done has annoyed me, but I’m glad that Webster has understood quickly. The stress of being the only one to not understand, out of your friends, must be huge.
Three totally different levels are working hard, and getting it right. Although, when I look over at Haggai I see long sentences appearing on the page instead of a list. I’ll be interested to see what he’s writing.
Actually, he’s questioning and reasoning the concept of adjectives, gerunds as nouns, comparatives, superlatives. I wonder what to do about him. I don’t want my private classes with Winter to be disrupted. I’m worried that Winter won’t be able to work as comfortably with a friend there who’s clearly so much more advanced than him. I want to ask Winter to come again in the week, and this Webster boy too, but should I really offer help to Haggai as well? did I just waste a book on him? He probably won’t bother coming again even if I do ask him.
Time rushes away fast and the three boys work hard and carefully, each one waiting patiently for me to look at their book. Even Haggai. Before they leave, while the lesson is winding down, I ask them all what school they go to, and find that Webster doesn’t go to school, just like I’d expected. When I ask him why not he doesn't understand, and Haggai just tells me “no money” and I feel like an idiot. I already know that Winter goes to the school in the compound where he lives, because the first time I met him he had taken me there so that I could see it. It’s a community school, for those who live in the compound, they pay a minimal amount of money; just enough to keep the school running. Haggai tells me no, he doesn't go to the same one, he goes to St Patrick's. I'd never heard of it, but I had already decided it would be a good one, probably more expensive and like most schools in Zambia, run to make money.
The time comes to send them away and I organise extra classes with the boys individually in the week. I want to meet them privately so I can give them each my undivided attention. Haggai helps me a lot with interpreting what I’m saying. I ask him where he lives, and he tells me Mwapona, which is the same compound as Winter and Webster; a crowd of cramped mud huts with straw roofs and struggling vegetable patches. Okay, so I didn’t expect that, and I offer to meet with him on Wednesday. He’s really keen, and as he leaves he tells me I’m a good teacher. I decide I like him after all.
***
The next day I have a lesson with just Webster. I had told him to arrive at 9 hours sharp. When it turns 9 I sit down to read. I’ve gotten used to the fact that my students will be at least twenty minutes late. As I sit down on the bed I take a look out the window. A boy has come through the gate and is talking to the others cutting the grass in the garden. He’s holding an exercise book, but I can’t believe that Webster would have arrived already. I give him a little wave and get up to let him in. He nods at me and I can sense his nervousness from through the glass window and all the way across the yard.
We sit around the table and get started right away. I have a look in his book and find that he’s written the alphabet, although he has a great deal of trouble when I ask him to say it. We work hard on it, writing out big and small letters and the letters with the sounds as well.
When it is time for a quick break I am eager to find out a little more about him. I learn that he’s 16 years old, and has never been to school. He has two brothers, Francis and John, and three sisters, Memory, Rebecca and Dyness. He lives with his father, his mother died when he was 12. I ask him whether his father works.
“No...can’t explain...not in English,” he thinks for a while. “In short, he doesn’t work.”
“Well, is he ill?” He doesn’t understand. “I mean, is he ill, not well, or healthy?”
“No, no...not healthy.” I can see he wants to say more but there’s this infuriating language barrier.
“And what about your mother? How did she pass away?”
“Umm, I can’t explain in English...” he says, while he continues to try, thinking hard.
“Was she sick?” I suggest.
“Yes, she was sick,” he says with more confidence than I’ve seen in him all day. “Sick, sick, sick, sick.” And with that he closes his book. “I wasn’t there, I heard and I came back. Because I was in the village.” He gestures with his hand, in the vague direction of the village I suppose.
How is it that time and again people use the phrase “the village” definitively, assuming that I will not need further explanation? what village? I want to ask, and why was he there? And who was he with, in this village? But I know I should stop. Maybe I’ve gone too far with the questions already. I decide to bring it back to his brothers and sisters. Do any of them go to school? None except for Francis, who’s 19, and is sponsored by his uncle. He’s in Grade 8.
“Do you want to go to school?”
“Yes, but there’s no money.”
“And your brothers and sisters?”
“Yes, but no money.”
As he’s leaving I tell him to come again tomorrow, and to bring Haggai. “Will you see him?”
“Yes, I stay with him,” he says.
What? I’m confused, it seems like these kids are all over the place, just when I think I’ve worked out who lives where with who. It turns out; Haggai sleeps at Webster’s house. His father rents a tiny room and Haggai doesn’t fit, so he goes over to sleep with Webster and then he eats with his father.
”Because of no money”, says Webster, meaning that his own family can’t afford to feed Haggai as well.
***
The next day when I'm arriving home, Mrs. Mfula tells me that Haggai has been over. He was asking for money to go to school, but I thought he went to school already? It turns out he finished Grade 7, and now that he has passed exams he wants to go back for Grade 8. With the little money Mrs. Mfula had to give him, he’s going to enrol this week. It’s not enough, but she will pay the rest later when she has it.
“He said he was really impressed with what you taught him,” says Mrs. Mfula, “he was really grateful.” This surprises me because in truth I was only trying to keep him occupied, and anyway, he came in so late that we had less than an hour. “He said he’s going to come every Saturday. He said to me ‘that teacher is good,’’” she tells me, which makes me really happy, and I realise that these kids have always been too shy to give me any feedback whatsoever.
“I like that boy!”
“Me too. Haggai’s going through a really tough time of it now, actually. His mother passed away, and his brothers and sisters went to live with the grandmother. Haggai stayed to take care of his father who’s sick. So it’s just the two of them.”
“Do you notice any difference,” I ask, “in the levels of self esteem in the kids who go to school round here and those who don't?”
She thinks a bit, squinting against the sun while she hangs washing on the line, fluttering cotton wraps, bright orange against the blue sky, eternally fantastic. “Those in school have a sense of pride, because they have a bit of knowledge. The kids who want to go to school are embarrassed that they don’t. But the kids who don’t want to go are not. When the parents are also uneducated then sometimes the kids don’t see the importance of school.”
Mrs Mfula sponsors children here, and whenever kids come and ask to be put on the programme she is careful to take time to explain to them the value of the education they are asking for, and the importance of attending every day and working hard. She checks up on them regularly; it's important to see how they are getting on. Like when neither Webster nor Haggai come for their lesson the following Saturday, and we go to Mwapona to find them.
***
They are sitting under a tree eating with the family. When they see us coming they get up so we can sit on their stools. Haggai tells me that he hadn’t come because he had fallen and hurt his hand when playing football. Webster was busy slashing grass beside the house. His step mother sits apart near the house grinding nuts, and I suspect that it was her who had told him to work instead of coming to class. I’m relieved that they are fine, and make them promise to come later in the week. We then walk with them over to Haggai’s father’s place to greet him.
Both the boys walk bare foot, and Mrs Mfula asks me to remind her to get them some cheap sandals when we are next in town. It feels safer walking around the compound with two boys who know it so well; we had gotten a little lost trying to find them. The most important thing I notice on that little walk, which I hadn't before, was how close the two are, and young. They hold hands, which I have come to realize is quite normal here. I first noticed this when Nelson from my Friday class was standing with another man at the building site outside the classroom. They were chatting about some important carpentry issue, hand in hand.
***
The following Saturday, Webster and Haggai both turn up and we have a lesson out on the veranda, me fussing between two very different capability levels.
We talk about football, and when I ask Haggai, “what would you buy if you were a famous footballer?” He tells me that he would buy a suit and a television.
“It has been my dream, ever since I started school in 2001,” he laughs. “My dream is to buy a house where I can keep my father and my brothers.” He doesn’t live with his brothers, but he hopes one day to send for them. It sounds like they are scattered all over Zambia. Same father, different mothers.
“Would this house be in Mwapona?”
“Ha! Noooo!”
“What will you need the suit for?”
“For my important job.”
Haggai wants to complete school and go on to university, so that he can become an accountant. It seems really strange that so many energetic young boys are talking about becoming accountants. When I suggest that maybe he would like to be a footballer like David Beckham, he tells me no, because his father wants him to be an accountant. This doesn’t sound like much of a dream to me, but then, in such a different world to mine, maybe that’s exactly what it is.
His situation was not at all uncommon: if he's in Grade 7 now, that means he will be how old when he reaches Grade 12? Much older than 18, the age you're supposed to be. His childhood had been repeatedly interrupted. I also used to teach his sister who was about 8 years old, in the local primary school. She would miss whole days because she had to wash clothes. My neighbour had missed a year or two because his mother had fallen ill and he had had to sell fritters on the street to pay for her medicine. Stories like Winter's quickly became typical, and when he told me his I was past being shocked, but was choked anew by the now familiar frustration that made me grind my teeth and dig my nails into my palms before, like him, I pretended there was no problem, we'll just see what we can do about it now. I helped him prepare for the end of year test, to determine whether he could progress in school, or would be repeating a year, pushing his finishing age up even further.
One morning, I was having a private class with Winter at the house, when half way through another boy turns up and sits confidently down at the table, which surprises me because previously all the kids who’ve been here to see Mrs. Mfula, the woman with whom I was living, have lingered nervously on the porch, usually for a long time, while they wait for her to finish her food, or her conversation with me, or to return home if she’s out. I guess that this smart young boy must be about 15, he obviously knows Winter and they share a joke together in the local language. I can’t imagine he’s here for class, but I don’t see why else he would be sitting at this table.
“Are you here to learn?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he says, looking right at me.
What else can I do but to get him a book and a pencil?
“Here you are”, I say handing it over.
I’m annoyed, because I don’t want to be interrupted. He looks much too smart and clean, and seems too cocky, to really warrant wasting the time I want to use helping someone who’s actually “in need”. After all, Winter is in tatty clothes, and has clearly come through the water to get here; there is no mistaking him for anything but poor. I decide quickly that he can’t possibly live in the same compound as Winter.
While I was fetching the book and pencil, another boy had arrived. This one has the mannerisms of Winter, and hovers around the table before I tell him to sit down.
“Are you here to learn?”
“Yes”, he whispers, and I go back to my room to fetch another book and pencil, more irritated again. Winter and I were making good progress, the last thing I want is for his friends to come along and turn this into some sort of youth club.
I ask them their names. The smart boy has already written “Haggai”, the same name as the boy who helped us with the roof repair of a widow just yesterday. But it surely can't be him, as he was scruffy and didn’t chat like this one; he was sponsored by Mrs Mfula to go to school, and this kid is clearly in no need of sponsorship. He probably lives in a house with his employed parents and goes to a good school. I even start to wonder if he’s here to take advantage of a free lesson, maybe sent by his thrifty father who could afford a private tutor but why pay if you can get it for free?
Webster doesn’t understand the question, and Haggai jumps in to explain. I turn back to Winter, but Webster is still lost, and I quickly realize that he can’t write. Haggai is telling him the letters but it means nothing to him. Not unkindly, Haggai takes the book and writes it for him. Webster is hardly moving, and certainly not about to look at me.
To Winter and Haggai, I give the next task. Write what you like doing. What you like doing. So start with ‘I like’, I point to the page, start with ‘I like’. Winter nods. Haggai sighs loudly, looking exasperated at the blank page in his new book (where at some point during the writing of Webster’s name he’d managed to write the day and the date neatly in the corner).
Winter and I look at him questioningly.
“I know how to write I like. I’m in Grade 8, OK?” he says, looking at me with eye contact that no other pupil has managed. “Give me something harder.”
So I ask him what an adjective is. He doesn’t know. I ask him to spell it but he doesn’t manage. He scribbles it down lightly and then spells it for me, missing out the ‘d’. After writing the word correctly, I explain the meaning and ask him to write down all the adjectives he can think of. That should keep him busy for a while. Sure enough he concentrates hard and starts writing.
I set the work for Winter and then write a sentence for Webster to copy. He looks at me. He hasn’t understood. Haggai looks up and with one word explains what he needs to do. A tiny nod from Webster and he gets on with it. It seems like I should be annoyed by this, as everything else Haggai has done has annoyed me, but I’m glad that Webster has understood quickly. The stress of being the only one to not understand, out of your friends, must be huge.
Three totally different levels are working hard, and getting it right. Although, when I look over at Haggai I see long sentences appearing on the page instead of a list. I’ll be interested to see what he’s writing.
Actually, he’s questioning and reasoning the concept of adjectives, gerunds as nouns, comparatives, superlatives. I wonder what to do about him. I don’t want my private classes with Winter to be disrupted. I’m worried that Winter won’t be able to work as comfortably with a friend there who’s clearly so much more advanced than him. I want to ask Winter to come again in the week, and this Webster boy too, but should I really offer help to Haggai as well? did I just waste a book on him? He probably won’t bother coming again even if I do ask him.
Time rushes away fast and the three boys work hard and carefully, each one waiting patiently for me to look at their book. Even Haggai. Before they leave, while the lesson is winding down, I ask them all what school they go to, and find that Webster doesn’t go to school, just like I’d expected. When I ask him why not he doesn't understand, and Haggai just tells me “no money” and I feel like an idiot. I already know that Winter goes to the school in the compound where he lives, because the first time I met him he had taken me there so that I could see it. It’s a community school, for those who live in the compound, they pay a minimal amount of money; just enough to keep the school running. Haggai tells me no, he doesn't go to the same one, he goes to St Patrick's. I'd never heard of it, but I had already decided it would be a good one, probably more expensive and like most schools in Zambia, run to make money.
The time comes to send them away and I organise extra classes with the boys individually in the week. I want to meet them privately so I can give them each my undivided attention. Haggai helps me a lot with interpreting what I’m saying. I ask him where he lives, and he tells me Mwapona, which is the same compound as Winter and Webster; a crowd of cramped mud huts with straw roofs and struggling vegetable patches. Okay, so I didn’t expect that, and I offer to meet with him on Wednesday. He’s really keen, and as he leaves he tells me I’m a good teacher. I decide I like him after all.
***
The next day I have a lesson with just Webster. I had told him to arrive at 9 hours sharp. When it turns 9 I sit down to read. I’ve gotten used to the fact that my students will be at least twenty minutes late. As I sit down on the bed I take a look out the window. A boy has come through the gate and is talking to the others cutting the grass in the garden. He’s holding an exercise book, but I can’t believe that Webster would have arrived already. I give him a little wave and get up to let him in. He nods at me and I can sense his nervousness from through the glass window and all the way across the yard.
We sit around the table and get started right away. I have a look in his book and find that he’s written the alphabet, although he has a great deal of trouble when I ask him to say it. We work hard on it, writing out big and small letters and the letters with the sounds as well.
When it is time for a quick break I am eager to find out a little more about him. I learn that he’s 16 years old, and has never been to school. He has two brothers, Francis and John, and three sisters, Memory, Rebecca and Dyness. He lives with his father, his mother died when he was 12. I ask him whether his father works.
“No...can’t explain...not in English,” he thinks for a while. “In short, he doesn’t work.”
“Well, is he ill?” He doesn’t understand. “I mean, is he ill, not well, or healthy?”
“No, no...not healthy.” I can see he wants to say more but there’s this infuriating language barrier.
“And what about your mother? How did she pass away?”
“Umm, I can’t explain in English...” he says, while he continues to try, thinking hard.
“Was she sick?” I suggest.
“Yes, she was sick,” he says with more confidence than I’ve seen in him all day. “Sick, sick, sick, sick.” And with that he closes his book. “I wasn’t there, I heard and I came back. Because I was in the village.” He gestures with his hand, in the vague direction of the village I suppose.
How is it that time and again people use the phrase “the village” definitively, assuming that I will not need further explanation? what village? I want to ask, and why was he there? And who was he with, in this village? But I know I should stop. Maybe I’ve gone too far with the questions already. I decide to bring it back to his brothers and sisters. Do any of them go to school? None except for Francis, who’s 19, and is sponsored by his uncle. He’s in Grade 8.
“Do you want to go to school?”
“Yes, but there’s no money.”
“And your brothers and sisters?”
“Yes, but no money.”
As he’s leaving I tell him to come again tomorrow, and to bring Haggai. “Will you see him?”
“Yes, I stay with him,” he says.
What? I’m confused, it seems like these kids are all over the place, just when I think I’ve worked out who lives where with who. It turns out; Haggai sleeps at Webster’s house. His father rents a tiny room and Haggai doesn’t fit, so he goes over to sleep with Webster and then he eats with his father.
”Because of no money”, says Webster, meaning that his own family can’t afford to feed Haggai as well.
***
The next day when I'm arriving home, Mrs. Mfula tells me that Haggai has been over. He was asking for money to go to school, but I thought he went to school already? It turns out he finished Grade 7, and now that he has passed exams he wants to go back for Grade 8. With the little money Mrs. Mfula had to give him, he’s going to enrol this week. It’s not enough, but she will pay the rest later when she has it.
“He said he was really impressed with what you taught him,” says Mrs. Mfula, “he was really grateful.” This surprises me because in truth I was only trying to keep him occupied, and anyway, he came in so late that we had less than an hour. “He said he’s going to come every Saturday. He said to me ‘that teacher is good,’’” she tells me, which makes me really happy, and I realise that these kids have always been too shy to give me any feedback whatsoever.
“I like that boy!”
“Me too. Haggai’s going through a really tough time of it now, actually. His mother passed away, and his brothers and sisters went to live with the grandmother. Haggai stayed to take care of his father who’s sick. So it’s just the two of them.”
“Do you notice any difference,” I ask, “in the levels of self esteem in the kids who go to school round here and those who don't?”
She thinks a bit, squinting against the sun while she hangs washing on the line, fluttering cotton wraps, bright orange against the blue sky, eternally fantastic. “Those in school have a sense of pride, because they have a bit of knowledge. The kids who want to go to school are embarrassed that they don’t. But the kids who don’t want to go are not. When the parents are also uneducated then sometimes the kids don’t see the importance of school.”
Mrs Mfula sponsors children here, and whenever kids come and ask to be put on the programme she is careful to take time to explain to them the value of the education they are asking for, and the importance of attending every day and working hard. She checks up on them regularly; it's important to see how they are getting on. Like when neither Webster nor Haggai come for their lesson the following Saturday, and we go to Mwapona to find them.
***
They are sitting under a tree eating with the family. When they see us coming they get up so we can sit on their stools. Haggai tells me that he hadn’t come because he had fallen and hurt his hand when playing football. Webster was busy slashing grass beside the house. His step mother sits apart near the house grinding nuts, and I suspect that it was her who had told him to work instead of coming to class. I’m relieved that they are fine, and make them promise to come later in the week. We then walk with them over to Haggai’s father’s place to greet him.
Both the boys walk bare foot, and Mrs Mfula asks me to remind her to get them some cheap sandals when we are next in town. It feels safer walking around the compound with two boys who know it so well; we had gotten a little lost trying to find them. The most important thing I notice on that little walk, which I hadn't before, was how close the two are, and young. They hold hands, which I have come to realize is quite normal here. I first noticed this when Nelson from my Friday class was standing with another man at the building site outside the classroom. They were chatting about some important carpentry issue, hand in hand.
***
The following Saturday, Webster and Haggai both turn up and we have a lesson out on the veranda, me fussing between two very different capability levels.
We talk about football, and when I ask Haggai, “what would you buy if you were a famous footballer?” He tells me that he would buy a suit and a television.
“It has been my dream, ever since I started school in 2001,” he laughs. “My dream is to buy a house where I can keep my father and my brothers.” He doesn’t live with his brothers, but he hopes one day to send for them. It sounds like they are scattered all over Zambia. Same father, different mothers.
“Would this house be in Mwapona?”
“Ha! Noooo!”
“What will you need the suit for?”
“For my important job.”
Haggai wants to complete school and go on to university, so that he can become an accountant. It seems really strange that so many energetic young boys are talking about becoming accountants. When I suggest that maybe he would like to be a footballer like David Beckham, he tells me no, because his father wants him to be an accountant. This doesn’t sound like much of a dream to me, but then, in such a different world to mine, maybe that’s exactly what it is.
