Esther

I shift the faded textbook to my left hand and look down at my right. Spreading from the fingertips to the palm is a powdery grayness. Black from the blackboard, white from the chalk. Somewhere a battered alarm bell rings weakly at the thought of broken battery guts – made into a paste, spread on the board in a fresh new darkness, coming off on my hands – but, blinking, I allow it to fade.

With the weight of hazy sunlight on my head, I cross the schoolyard to the shade of the shea tree, set my book on a crowded old wooden table, and sigh into a chair. “The form three students are noisy today,” I remark across the table to Esther.

“Ehn, even since morning assembly,” she agrees softly, raising her eyebrows. She glances down at Nafisa, who is nursing in her arms. Her face is impatient but kind, as if she’s grinding her teeth against a spreading smile. Despite her age, her brow is already showing lines of understanding. Her eyes reveal a hidden firmness. “Nafi, you weren’t hungry this morning, but now that I have class you won’t let go.”

I smile, leaning to the side to wash my hands with water from a sachet. Reluctantly the black smudges follow the white chalk dust in a trickle to the ground. The rest comes off in a graying handkerchief.

Esther looks up at me. “Did you hear the Ashanti Regional Minister’s speech?”

“No, I didn’t,” I answer. “What did he say?”

“He was talking about these killings in Ashanti Region as if they were not a problem. It is a problem, sir! Your people are being killed and it’s not a problem?”

“Maybe he’s thinking about the election this year.”

“Ehn, maybe. He said that some of them were ‘even prostitutes’. Even prostitutes! So is it not a crime if they are prostitutes?” Esther, conscious of Nafisa, gestured as well as she could with her chin and feet.

“Psh,” I shake my head. “It’s always a crime.”

A thin, long-armed student approaches the table with a persistent slight bow. “Madam,” he mouths softly.

Esther turns her head powerfully on him. “Is it class time?”

He nods, already backpedalling.

She looks at me then down at Nafisa, whose hand has begun a slow journey to her own chest in a drowzy plunge. “I worry about them sometimes,” Esther remarks in a low voice. Gingerly she gathers Nafisa in one arm, and with her free hand works her breast back into her dress.

“You worry about your students?” I ask.

Still in the chair, Esther is bent sideways to the ground, setting Nafisa on a mat. “Nafi-Nafi,” she coos. Nafisa squirms and smacks in her sleep.

Esther sits up. “All of Ghana’s students,” she answers, still looking at her daughter. “We have so many problems – our politicians, our money – but the politicians and the money will never fix it. Our students will be the ones to fix the problems, but maybe they will do it wrong.”

“How would they do it wrong?”

She stands up and gathers her teaching supplies, squinting across the schoolyard into dry farmland. “I don’t know. But my father doesn’t like the changes I want to make, so I believe I won’t like the changes they will make.”

“Hmm. In my place we say that the next generation will always be better than the current one.”

Esther shrugs. “But we are changing faster than you.”