Staff Lessons

Staff Lessons

Twice a week, in a room that serves as the cleaning office of SMMUCo, I give English lessons to cleaning and kitchen staff members. Like large imposing sentries, two wooden cupboards from floor to ceiling stand solidly on opposite walls. (Unlike sentries, the cupboards hold linens.) A stack of foam mattresses sags against one wall.

When I arrive for class, we begin by removing various things left on our study table: keys, a pile of folded laundry, an electric tea kettle, the college iron, or someone’s forgotten cell phone. Once we clear the table, I find myself fascinated by the worn table cloth underneath-it’s covered with pen drawings. I never knew doodling on a table cloth was allowed.

Because our table sits against the only window in the office, we watch with dread when someone approaches from the other side. In middle of a drill on interrogatives (who-nani? what-nini? when-lini? where-wapi?), Innocent from the library comes to tell Catherine, the assistant cook, that he wants to buy cell phone credit. Just when I’m about to shout a big hooray after all five students have done the interrogative drill in lickety-split speed, a college student wants Anna to clean up someone’s vomit. If the request comes from a college student, I use an authoritative voice to say we are in the middle of class and they should come back later.

Despite various agents that threaten our efforts, we plod forward. After I write each lesson in a spiral notebook, after I give the lesson out loud during class, my students will pass the notebook throughout the next two days to each other. By the time the book travels from the cleaning office for Anna and Mama Vanessa, to Eliasante at the provost’s office, then to Catherine and Upendo in the kitchen, the book’s lesson has been copied and then slightly altered by grease or tomato stains and the general dust of Masoka. By Wednesday morning, hours before the next lesson, Mama Vanessa brings it to me, and I begin again on the next lesson.

Lately my lessons focus on the ongoing saga of Kimbori, the security guard rumored (falsely) to have two wives. After Kimbori asked me to be his third wife one evening at the dining hall, I had excellent material for drama: one wife is a thief, another makes horrible food, another one hates to work, and Kimbori ends each episode with a sigh. My students now know what a sigh is, and they understand how to make a possessive with an apostrophe s because the thief-wife stole quite a few belongings of the other wives for at least three weeks in a row.

The other day, I arrived earlier than my students, having whipped out the latest episode in the life of Kimbori and his three wives. With the extra time I studied the table cloth once again. Written neatly among the lines, squares, stars and circles already drawn, I found “who-nani? what-nini? when-lini? where-wapi?”