X.....Student Becomes the Teacher
Maleeza Orilonise: Mum/Writer
5pm on a school night, priding myself on the military precision of the stages of the "witching hours", play, home work, supper, bath...Stirring the steaming pot of culinary delights with one hand as I multi tasked the challenging first world problem of a low battery and checked my phone with the other. I was alerted to the fact I could no longer hear my rambunctious Kindergartener playing next door in the living room. Wooden spoon intact, phone in the other hand with a maternal intensity of which only mothers are privy, I yanked
open the pocket door to the living room...As I strutted purposeful across the room my internal alarm commanded me to stop after my fifth step.
I witnessed an indelible Polaroid of my 5 year old son.
Ashamed, so engrossed in judgement of what I had automatically deemed a negative deed transpired into an intrusion of my physical being. My son and his grandmother were laying on the floor, oblivious of my presence. Submerged in a magical interaction of such magnitude torrents of hot salty tears cascaded over my cheeks.I silently raised my phone and captured the moment with a candid image.
I could have heard a penny drop.
The mischievous silence was deafening.
Compelled bymy curiosity to explore I entered stealth mode...
A matriarch swaddled in traditional Yoruba cloth, identified by tribal scars.
Silhouettes...mirroring her teachers posture.
Rampant arthritis commanding her fingers to defiantly concave around a pencil.
Witness to the ilk of a clandestine affair. A visual revelation, they were engrossed. I was an intruder, the realization ensuring I immediately commence my silent retreat backwards.
I was never there.
Betraying a confidence, not my forte. However how could I refrain from not sharing this intimate revelation?
Seemingly selfish to retain.
I feel a compelling urge to share with the world...
Everyday I will teach you a new letter and this weekend I will teach you how to draw.
The pupil had become the tutor.
Tobias a Kindergartener was teaching his 80 year old grandmother an illiterate who had begged to attend school 75 years ago in a remote village Mushini Abuja, Nigeria.
Tobias was teaching his grandmother to write her name as opposed to her customary X for the first time in her 80 years,
Bushiratu Orilonise wrote her name.
