In the Comfort of Children

Mama Mzungu TB, this is my full name to the children.

It started really with the cough that rattled Sylvia’s body when we first got her, which took weeks and a few rounds of treatment to finally cure.

“We keep giving you drugz, but it’s not going away,” Ester had told her.

Sylvia became wide-eyed and silent.

“Don’t scare her,” I said to Ester. I turned to Sylvia, patting her back.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

Sylvia’s cough finally cleared, but then Beatrice, B2 or Ajambo as named by her siblings, developed one. The threat of TB was gone, but lingered in the backs of their little minds.

“Ajambo TB! Ajambo TB!” Sylvia shouted to Beatrice.

B2, forever gentle and sweet, responded merrily bashful; her dark lips trying to cover her easy bright smile. Rachel saw that I was slightly amused and was encouraged to continue teasing her sister. I looked at the little one.

“If she’s Ajambo TB, then you’re Baby TB.”

The kids thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard. I pointed to each of them: Sylvia TB, Ogola TB, Agnes TB.

I patted my chest: Mama Mzungu TB. They lost it.

“Mama Mzungu TB! Mama Mzungu TB!” Rachel cheered falling over herself with uncontrollable laughter.

The kids are unrecognizable superstars of their former ill, neglected selves. And my experience in helping with their transformation has confirmed what I always knew to be true, being a parent, or at least attempting to be a good one, is, besides maybe being the President, the hardest job imaginable.

The feeding, bathing, schooling, tutoring, treating, supervising, disciplining, coaching, guiding, and loving is as rewarding as it is challenging; made all the more difficult in a developing country without running water, without two parents, with uneducated, little minds and a language and cultural barrier.

I will tell them something and hear, “Yes, mama,” but it’s not done. Did they misunderstand me, or are they just doing what they please?

“You bring Rachel’s medicine in the morning to jah jah’s on your way to school.”

“Yes, mama,” Agnes politely replied to me.

The next day, the drugs never arrived. Probably lost in translation. But.

“You be at jah jah’s after you get up – by nine. Get there right away,” Ester had told Richard one morning. It was quarter to ten and we needed to be at the hospital. Where was he?

Tired of waiting at jah jah’s, I fetched him at the children’s home in Namengo, about a 15 minutes’ walk from where I stay. The boy was not ready; for some reason he decided to clean his uniform after he was supposed to leave. I knew he understood Ester speaking to him in Luganda, so what was he thinking?

Another day I found one of the Balaza’s forks hidden in his book.

“Why did you take this?” I asked him as we stood by the road. He muttered something about Sylvia. I told Ester.

“Yeah, they are picking things from their jah jah’s. The other day he hid a hanger in the back of his shirt and I found it in Namengo,” she said vaguely discouraged as she twisted a client’s hair in her shop.

I was concerned, but understood why they were taking the trivial and mundane. They had nothing before. A fork was a big deal, to own a hangar unthinkable.

And there were mild mendacities slowly emerging like sly fungus.

Agnes had come to jah jah’s one afternoon for lunch. Stephen sat at the table watching her eat and asked her why she wasn’t taking food as she normally did at school. She said they didn’t have lunch that day; a thinly veiled, sophomoric lie.

Ester, the Balazas and I decided it was time to have a chat with the kids. We set the boundaries now.

“I don’t want you children lying and stealing! You listen to your mamas and jah jahs! And you need to keep this place clean! Do you hear me? Look at this mess! You behave or I do to you what I did to little Jennifer!” Stephen directed them one night in their tiny home; beatings and their threat standard African child discipline.

The children, thankfully, seem to have heard jah jah’s words. We haven’t noticed things going missing in the house, I haven’t caught the children being untruthful; their teachers say their behavior is improving.

“Yes, Rachel is well behaved now. Now that she has motherly love,” the headmistress told me recently as I fetched the youngest of the clan and her report card, the school term just ending.

Rachel’s marks were the best of her four older siblings as to be expected since her simplistic schoolwork basically involves matching pictures and letters. The others are far behind.

"Oh good! Good, good, fairly good, good, good, fair, fairly good. This is good, Sylvia.” I congratulated the second youngest as she hung on my lap smiling with gapping teeth. I was looking at the first page of her report folder, handwritten reviews of the girl’s performance in areas such as letters, numbers, and verbal English. Behind the report card were pages of her work. But it was virtually all wrong: insequencal letters, incorrect addition, misspelled words. I laughed to myself shaking my head. The headmistress wanted to promote Sylvia to P1, the first level in primary school after next term since she was already too big for nursery school. She wasn’t ready. None of it was good.

Richard and Beatrice were doing fair at best in P2 and Agnes was totally failing P5. It’s not that they weren’t trying. Their teachers acknowledged their desire to learn. At least they try. Only Agnes could spell her name when they came to us after all. With school out for three weeks now was an opportunity to play catch up. I needed for them a private tutor.

“Yes, I will tutor Agnes and we’ll get another for the other three. It’ll be 50,000 for each teacher. They will go to school from eight to three for the big one and until after lunch for the others,” Agnes’ English teacher had told me.

I agreed enthusiastically. Fifty dollars for three weeks of almost a full day of private schooling was a good deal for me and the extra money welcomed by two lucky teachers.

The Monday after their regular classes ended I brought the kids to the school. The teacher for the three little ones wasn’t there yet. Agnes entered the regular class held during holiday, sitting with the other children; her private lessons apparently not starting promptly. This is Africa, I calmed myself.

I came back at eleven to give the children some food; they only took porridge for breakfast and I knew they would be hungry by late morning; they needed nourishment for concentration. The kids were out of class lounging under a tree. I went to find their teacher.

"They are taking a thirty minute break. We go back to work then they’ll be home for lunch at one,” the teacher assured me. Okay.

The kids entered the house at quarter to one. As usual, Beatrice proudly showed me her schoolwork without my asking; a page of math, two pages of English.

“Where’s the rest of it?” She looked confused. I called for Ester’s sister, Carole, in the kitchen to translate.

“She says that’s all they did.”

“WHAT?”

Carole repeated herself.

“What about you, Richard? You show me what you did today and you too, Sylvia.”

Richard opened his exercise book to one page of math and one of English. Sylvia had only a matching letters exercise; I had rage.

“This is what they do with a private tutor for five hours!”

Carole chuckled smugly.

I tore back to school, walking with the exercise books in hand, recalling Margaret’s warning that she would locate a tutor because people are funny and will take your money and they won’t help the kids; fiery Irish temper making my head swim.

I greeted the headmaster and stuck the pages under his nose, showing him the pathetically small amount of work. Like Carole, he laughed, and asked one of this staff to walk me to the woman who was supposed to be mentoring my children.

“It’s the first day. We can’t do much the first day,” she said with a big smile on her face.

“You only did one page here. This is not ‘not much,’ this is nothing!”

The woman said something about the children playing.

“I am not taking them here to play. If I wanted them to play I would have kept them at home. I am paying you to teach them!”

“Okay,” the woman still said grinning, not getting why I was mad, probably also amused by the silly, angry mzungu. “Tomorrow we will do more.”

“Yes, you will do much more or I am getting my money back!”

I walked back home and slopped matoke and gnut sauce in my bowel. I chewed not tasting the food; Agnes came through the door.

“Hi Aggie. How was school?”

"It's good."

“Can you please show me what you did?”

She pulled one exercise book from her bag and flipped it open to the first page half-way filled with neatly written math problems in ink.

“Is this all?”

“Yes.”

“Did you do English?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

I called for Carole again.

“She says that’s all they did,” Carole translated for me even more amused than before. She, a former teacher, was undoubtedly well aware of the ethics lacking in the profession.

I could feel my blood rising past simmer.

“Ask her if she was alone with the teacher or if she was with the rest of the class?”

They spoke. Then:

“She says she was with the other kids.”

I threw my hands in the air.

“Can you believe this? They are stealing from me! People here see mzungu and all they want is money. This doesn’t happen in America. If you pay somebody to do something, they do it. I was afraid this would happen.”

I looked at Agnes. Her face was sour.

“I’m not mad at you, Agnes. I am mad at your teachers.”

I stormed out of the house again, this time to confront the Agnes’ teacher, the one who called me friend and asked why I hadn’t brought him back anything from Rwanda, the one who had suggested that he tutor the kids in the first place. He wasn’t at school or his home across the street. I went for the headmaster again.

“Hi, sebo,” I greeted him friendly, but agitated. “Will you look at what Agnes’ tutor did for five hours today?”

This time he wasn’t amused.

“This is not good. And this is bad for me too,” he said concerned; the first I’d seen the jovial man humorless.

“Yes, I am sorry to bother you, but this is not what I am paying them for. They are not serious.”

“No, they are not serious. You gave them 100,000? 50,000 each?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You get your money back and I will have two teachers who will tutor the children tomorrow. Be here at eight.”

“Thank you, sebo. Seba burrungi.”

I strove towards home, blood pressure slowly lowering, relieved by the headmaster’s rightful alarm and intervention, but still irritated; after months of acclimation, of living with Ugandans, of becoming familiar, my surroundings and experiences were losing their novelty and I was fraying under Uganda’s corrupt culture. Where are the morals? Can I trust anyone?

Within there is a growing disturbance, I am endlessly questioning virtually everyone around me; my relationships are inextricably compromised, my relations defined by my having infinitely more; I am a have, and they have-nots; the have-nots assume with the wave of a magic mzungu wand I can extricate them from poverty’s absurdity and mire; I, the have, come from a society dazzling rich with money and transparency and truth, and they, the have-nots, have developed in a culture poor in every respect, wrecking their country and minds; I am never quite sure what someone is asking of me, never certain what one is prying from me, never clear of the intentions behind the mask; I, the have, and they, have-nots, all of us are all aware of what I have they not; my relationships with almost everyone, both those close and distant, those common and strangers, rests on this. It is tiresome. Very.

My oasis from this stress, from walking the streets harassed by passersby, from acquaintances pushing their items or services, from familiars lamenting their financial problems, from street children trying to swindle my shillings, are my own children: Agnes, Richard, Beatrice, Sylvia and Rachel. I don’t worry about what their attempting to squeeze from me, or what their kind actions conceal, or what they are covertly asking, or what their intentions are in saying this or telling that. They just love me and appreciate me, as well as each other. They quite simply are refreshingly themselves: happy, healthy, sweet little kids relishing their second chance at life.