Little Girls with Books

We are back in South Africa. I am surrounded by little girls holding their books, patiently waiting for their turn to read to me. Most of the boys are with Joel, a short term missionary from Canada awaiting his visa for Zimbabwe. The boys practice soccer moves with Joel, but when they are tired, they too get books and crowd so closely to read that I lose sight of him sitting in the dirt, leaning against the wall of the township church. More children sit on the steps. Each one holds an open book. Most are reading aloud, carefully sounding out each word. English is not their first language. Zulu or Xhosa is. But English will be their key to success in school and the job market.

A boy makes a dismissive gesture at a girl who is reading. He looks over the top of the book, and it is clear that he could read it at twice the speed. The girl stands as high as my shoulder. She’s maybe twelve years old, the age of Jairus’ daughter. Yet she struggles to read a story on an early second grade level.

But she wants to read it. Maybe it is an adult paying attention to her. Maybe it is my exotic white skin. But she is reading.

“She’s doing fine,” I tell the boy and shoe him away. I have to tell the girl some of the words. Prompt her here and there, but she finishes the story and looks at me with pride.

“That’s great,” I say. “We’ll do it again next week.

One of the other girls has chosen a harder book. She points at each word with her finger, but she reads more quickly, with less stumbling. “Ow! Ow!” she cries when the boy in the story is frightened by a spider.

I pat her shoulder. “That’s wonderful,” I say. “You’re reading with expression.” She grins and carries on with the story.

My collection of books is getting dusty, red smudges. Some of the covers are bent in the scramble to see who will read what. I try to watch out for the library books and remind the children that they are borrowed from the library right there in Tembisa. There are two libraries in the township, but both are too far for these children to walk. I hope they will remember and always think of libraries as wonderful places where they can get books.

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.