Little Hamida

After waiting in the empty classroom for over two hours, I glimpsed Semayna strolling in with her signature amble through the gateless entrance of the sand-floored courtyard.

One of the student-teachers, the handsome and talkative Jacob, had kept me company meanwhile.
Yesterday Semayna and the Pastor had made much show of starting off the trek to the village promplty at 10am, the pastor clapping his hands in excited anticipation of fresh starts and new things, and of perhaps the possibility that his HIV outreach program would finally kick off, and some new numbers, pie charts, graphs and such would appear on the almost bare white sheet of foreign-quality paper that hung on his office wall. Semayna had nodded and smiled all the while at the Pastor's slightly grand goals for the HIV education endeavour, at the plan to cover at least 10 families today, recording new births, and starting a census.
We had shuffled around this for an hour in his office before he told me to take the day off.

However when I reached the school this morning Semayna was nowhere to be found and the Pastors office was padlocked. In an attempt to locate Semayna (who had her own cell phone to my surprise), Amina made a phone call from my cell phone, the cheap plastic thing we had been given on our arrival.
The reply was "she will be hee-ya in ten minutes, dont woarry." An hour later I made her text Semayna again - Amina texts like a Tokyo native - and the reply was "She is on ha way, she doesnt live very fah". As I found out later, Semayna who had no real day employment, did indeed live less than a ten minute walk away from the school, in a squatter settlement with electricity.

I call Jacob the student-teacher because he had just completed his high school courses, received his diploma at twenty-one and was 'taking' computer classes so he could become an engineer one day. The 'taking' as meant by Jacob is actually future tense, the realization of this hope hinging on luck and finance. Meanwhile he 'taught' computer classes in the afternoons at the school, sessions which had been suspended for 2 weeks because the school had not paid its electricity bill.
He couldn't afford to go to University so was learning on his own - something I have seen him do little of because of the lack of books or instructor. The summer before, an American youth from Arizona had spent 6 weeks here and had taught Jacob some basics about programming.
That time remained like a bright and wonderous spot of light in Jacobs life, he talked about it as if it were yesterday, as if the honor of being taught by an American had somehow hinted at coming favors from God, and altered his future in some unseen manner.

The three-legged wooden board, standing in the middle of nowhere near the tap adjacent to the courtyard entrance displayed about forty coloured photographs, one with its corners wilted from the humidity accumulated behind the cracked glass cover, of a young blonde man with his arm around the beaming Jacob.

He had come to the classroom, dragging a wooden chair, his tall and lean body bending springingly at the knees, and had sat down next to me. I was facing the door so I could catch the unusual breeze blowing today, the sky a dark blotchy gray, an electric smell in the air, both scaring and exciting me. Rain was torrential here. Streets flooded, electric poles fell, people died. So Agnes had told me calmly in her even tone, her eyes half closed while chewing slowly on her spinach and rice.

"So", said he grinning from ear to ear, and held out his hand.
"My name is Jacob, and what is yours please?"

I introduce myself.
"I am very happy to welcome you to Africa, Tanzania. Is this your first time?"

"Yes"

"Which country do you come from?"

"The United States" I said, feeling like a liar for some reason.

"The United States!" he exclaimed. "From Arizona?"

"No from California"

"Kaalifornia" he enuciated it slowly, taking delight.

"You do not look American."

He nodded thoughtfuly at the disclosure that I was Pakistani, and later as it inevitably came up, that I was a Muslim. It seemed to be no big deal apparently, my being Muslim. But for several reasons which would later become clear to me, I felt like I should have been very blonde and definitely Christian.

He told me he was the oldest of eight children, his mother lay on her bed for most of the day in the smokey-walled 2 bedroom house, since her stroke.

"Is it true that Aspirin will cure my mother?"


A Western nurse had told him as he seemed to have understood her, that Asprin would fix her paralysed arm and leg. Apparently his mother had or maybe she had not taken an Asprin about 3 weeks after her symptoms started. It could have been the medicine the witch doctor had given her, or maybe it was the medicine from the huge government hospital, Jacob wasnt even sure, as he tried to recall.

I explained it's role in the immediate aftermath of a stroke and in the importance of taking it daily.

He suddenly looked rueful, "She is not taking Asprin every day."

As soon as he had dipped, he perked up and asked me about "Soccah", when I offered nothing, he told me how much he loved Miami.

"How many in your family?"

"Four"

"All brothers?"

"No, mom dad and two sisters."

"Oh so it is two," he laughed, "not four".

Then he stopped "Only two?"

Jacob would later explain as I made that error several times, that family meant siblings.

"Will you be my friend?" I said sure, and he formally took my hand shook it extensively, the sealing in of long negotated formal treaty.

"You are my new friend, I am so happy I cannot tell you."




Semayna on seeing me, waved and threw her black scarf across her shoulder as she climbed two steps upto the classroom.
H small frame snug in a well fitting cherry-coloured moonshine dress that fell rather gracefully to her ankles, so formal, and bright it was absurd, yet reassuring. It was party time. We could pretend.

She hugged me, "Salamalaikum", and I caught a whiff of perfumed oil that took me back to Medina and the Prophets Mosque. Semayna was immaculately clean, not a speck of dirt under her clipped toenails even when she worse open toed plastic slippers, her hair a shiny black nest of curls placed on the crown of her head, her skin shiny and moisturized.
I noticed this relative cleanliness amongst several Muslim families later that day in the village. Thats also when I realized Semayna's hair was a wig.