Just Me and My Brother

I read one of the Bright and Early books for Beginners today, Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. The children at St. Francis where I read in the morning are fluent in English. They drummed on their knees in time with the rhyme. The children of the same age at Arebaokeng in the afternoon have very little English. When I read Teeth and Tusks, they chattered enthusiastically to each other about the animals in the pictures, using languages I don’t understand. But Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb (dum, ditty, dum, ditty, dum, dum, dum!) communicated very well. I was still hearing chants of ‘dum, ditty’ half an hour later as they sat on their little plastic chairs in the dirt yard, trading books to look at as fast as they could go through them. If I accomplish nothing else, perhaps these children will at least have a love for books.

The book I chose for the older children was Just Me and My Brother (Jaws/Heinemann, 2004). It has more words per page than the books I choose for the little ones, but the older children go to school in English and understand most of what I say. As soon as I announced the title one of the boys shot up his hand. “That’s like me,” he said. The story is about the emotions and challenges of children living on their own. It was my last story of four and at times I wondered why I was bothering as I shouted over the noise of restless little ones, who didn’t want to miss out even though the story was beyond them. But afterwards while the children looked at books, I noticed a boy of about twelve in a corner of the yard, totally oblivious to the confusion around him, engrossed in Just Me and My Brother.