Send my niece to a better school
When I left the country, they were only kids, running about in glee whenever I visited, chanting, “Sekuru! Sekuru vauya mhamha!” Then I would gather them, all four of them, and say, “Who’s ready for the supermarket?”, and like kindergarten kids, they would toss little hands in the air, screaming, “Me! Me!”
Now, a mere twelve years later, to hear that Emma has four children, Ella is already divorced and now heads a disrgruntled ex-wives mob mauler, and Enya fights daily with her husband over who should work and who should stay at home with the children (an unstated number of children), to hear all this about the three older E’s just makes me think that I must be old and that I have lived out of the country for too long. Then there is the youngest of the notorious E’s, Enji, who just told me today that she has turned sixteen.
“You are celebrating your birthday, you said?” I ask, my voice competing with the bawling of a child in the background. I don’t want to even imagine someone telling me that the little crying human is hers.
“Yes, uncle, can you imagine!” she says.
“Congratulations, muzukuru. You are dangerously old,” I say.
I hear her repeating what I just said to her mother, my sister, who had handed the phone to her in the first place. Polite laughter erupts from wherever they are, a place so noisy I am wondering where that could be. Certainly not a phone shop because they called me from the cell phone I sent them several months ago, which I pay for from here. But that’s not the point, is it?
She is sixteen.
“What Form are you in now?” I ask. Of course, I don’t know what Form she is in. She lives with her father in Dzivarasekwa and occassionally visits her mother, especially around the time she knows my sister is going to call me. Calls that often end with plans to have me visit Wal-Mart where there is the next Moneygram, not Western Union.
“I’m in Form 2,” she says.
That’s already a problem. At sixteen she should be in Form Three or Four, right? I mean, how old was I when I was in Form Three, back in 1986. Minus 1969. That equals seventeen. So at sixteen she is in Form 2, which means she will be in Form Three when she turns seventeen. Never mind.
“Where do you go to school?” I ask, because, again, I haven’t seen these girls, all of them, since 1996, twelve years ago. All I remember are those uncle-let’s-go-to-supermarket cute things, always seeming so many that I always lost count as to whether they were only four or were five, six, seven… I was a university student then, with a wallet full of student aid money. Indeed, those supermarket trips gave some breathing space to the wallet. I was spoiling them, I know, but there is definitely more to the story.
So she is in Form Two, like I was in Form Two when I was her age. That’s still a problem. I was in Form Two at sixteen because I did not start school on time. Most of my peers had started school at six, or in the case of a few, at five. But six was common in the village. Seven for me was necessary because when I was six the head master of the local primary school took one look at me and told my mother, “He can use one more year of herding goats. Then when next year comes, he can come to school as well.”
That’s why I was sixteen when I was in Form Two. Why is she only in Form Two at sixteen, considering that she was born in the city? But that’s not the important point now, is it?
“I do well at school, uncle,” she says. “But we don’t have teachers there.”
“You don’t have teachers?” I didn’t even mean it to be a question. Who doesn’t know about the crisis in the country? This is the time when they can say anything, especially over the phone, and it could be believed. Someone may simply say, “Nowadays we eat our sadza with salt water as relish,” and it can easily be believed. In fact, just saying, I am from Zimbabwe gets many a stranger gasping for air. It can even make the CNN news, and viewers would nod, speechless. So there are no teachers at her school.
“We just go to school to play. The few teachers who sometimes show up just come to watch us play, uncle.”
I used to have dreams about all my nieces excelling in school, finishing high school with outstanding passes. I always pictured them contacting me to ask questions like, “How do I apply to Stanford? What do you know about Oxford?” But when they stopped writing to me between 2000 and 2003, when they did not come to the phone when I called my sister, I knew there would be no one from that end to ask me about Harvard. Sure enough, news came in 2005 that one of them, it must have been Ella, was leaving her husband. And I remember asking, “How can she leave a husband if she never went to one?” But then, that had caused some choking laughter, with my sister saying, “You act like you don’t know you have grown up wives here.” Wives. Right, nieces are like wives, the thing we grew up hearing in Mazvihwa. But they shouldn’t have taken this literally, in the sense of growing up to surprise me with the news that the reason they were quiet between 2000 and 2003 is that they were busy dropping out of school and becoming wives. The three older sisters who had turned sixteen, eighteen, and nineteen. They became wives at the same time. Well, correct this: two became wives, and one became partner of and co-habitant with her man. They had a child together, but then she left him when it became clear that he was not going to send bride price to her parents.
She is sixteen and doing Form Two, she says, but there are no teachers at her school. At least I have one niece interested in school, one niece following in my footsteps of chasing books. But a school with no teachers?
“So listen Enji. I want you to finish school,” I say.
I allow her to chuckle.
“I want you to look for a different school, even a boarding school.”
“You want to send me to a boarding school, uncle?” she asks.
“Any school that’s better than where you are,” I say. “That’ll be my birthday present to you. Do you think you are smart?”
“Very smart,uncle. I want to go far,” she says. Something in me begins to melt.
“So then ask your mother to help you find a better school, okay?”
“Okay, sekuru!” she says, voice lowered, and I hear the child in the background crying louder. And there are other sounds too, like things falling. Falling like how most things have fallen in the country.
“I’m going to give the phone back to Mhamha now; she’s giving me the look,” she says.
“So make sure you start the assignment I gave you, okay?”
“Okay, uncle.”
Before I can say anything extra to her, the voice that floods my ear is her mother’s, my sister who thinks talking on a cell phone always means shouting. But in a country with no service half the time, don’t blame her.
” Please help my niece get into a better school. I will pay.”
“You will pay! There are many good schools she can go to,” says my sister.
“Let’s have just one girl who chases her dream.”
“Sure. We’ll start looking right away.” Pause. ” As I was saying, the landlady came this morning.”
“She did?”
“I told her I just returned from the rural areas and I have nothing.”
“You used it all up in Mazvihwa?”
“I have nothing. When she left she didn’t look happy, but she will come back on Monday.”
“Well, let me see what I may try to do,” I say. I have learned not to be very specific about money promises when I deal with people back home. You make a commitment, even a mere suggestion of a commitment and the phone will ring non-stop, raising the issue of how they can afford to call that often if they can’t even pay their rent.
“So what should I tell her?”
I want to say, “Nothing.” I also want to ask, “How am I supposed to know what you should tell your landlady?” but I can’t. She just returned from the village, where I had sent her to check if mother is doing fine. We have an un-vocalised understanding that she conveys my messages and money to the village and I somehow pay her. Pay her I should. I hear the trip from Harare to Mazvihwa has become the closest experience of a trip to hell one can have on earth.
She has told me stories about getting stuck on road sides for days, of being dumped in a small town by a bus whose drivers declared they had reached their destination even though the passengers had paid for a full trip to Zvishavane or Bupwa. The most horrific one was when she spent four days and nights as a homeless person in Zvishavane, until a man who was driving to Harare agreed to transport her on credit, demanding that he would need the fare in US dollars. I sent the one hundred US dollars on short notice, glad that that’s all the man had demanded. So, yes, she should ask me what she should tell the landlady.
“Tell her Monday. I’ll contact you tomorrow. If I can’t reach your phone, just call me at night, Sunday night.”
“Thank you so much, bhudhi. Sit far away from the fire!”
That’s what they all say, in all its variations. Don’t sit too close to the fire. Sit not too close to the fire. Avoid the fire. Sit far away from the fire. I hate it. If you want to give me some words of appreciation, how about: Make sure your bills are paid first before you send us some money? Or variations like: Take care of yourself first. Don’t stretch yourself too thin. Quit one of your jobs and enjoy your weekends. Settle your debt first, then think about us.
“Mother was very happy about the blanket you sent her,” my sister’s voice slices through my silence.
“Oh, thank you for travelling to Mazvihwa for me.”
“That’s what I am here for.” There is a pause, some shuffling sounds from the background. “I always like it when I travel to Mazvihwa in one piece. This last time, I almost…” then click! The battery must be dead.
I will hear from her tomorrow night.
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Great story Emmanuel! I can just picture this scenario acted out a thousand times in different homes across Zimbabwe with their repsective diasporean relatives.
Thank you, fj. Hopefully, things will change for the better soon. Vanhu vari kutambura mhani!