Nomvula Failed the Alley Dock Twice, and I Kept Teaching Her Anyway

The White Corolla on Sutherland Street

I have taught people to drive in Mthatha for nineteen years. My car is a white Toyota Corolla with dual controls, a dent in the back left door from a learner who confused reverse with first in 2014, and a sticker on the dashboard that says "Breathe" in my granddaughter's handwriting. I park it most mornings on Sutherland Street near the taxi rank, and people find me there. That is how it has always worked.

I am fifty-four. I started the driving school after my husband passed, with the insurance money and a loan from my brother in East London. I thought I was buying a car. I was really buying a life of sitting in the passenger seat, watching young people discover that they are braver and more frightened than they ever knew.

How the Money Used to Arrive

Most of my learners pay per lesson. Some pay at the start, some pay at the end, some pay a week later, and some, I have to be honest, never pay at all. They arrive with notes folded into tiny squares, coins counted out in my palm, sometimes a promise. A mother once paid me with a bag of oranges and an apology. A taxi driver's son paid me two weeks late in twenty rand notes, each one looking as if it had been through a war.

I wrote it all in a hardcover exercise book with a picture of a lion on it. Every learner had a page. A tick meant paid, a circle meant owed, a cross meant I had given up. By the end of each year there were more circles than I liked to admit.

I am not a hard woman about money. I know what Mthatha is like. I know what it costs to come in from Ngqeleni or Libode in a taxi for a forty five minute lesson. But I also have a car to service, petrol that never gets cheaper, a licence to renew, and a granddaughter in school uniform that she grows out of every six months.

Nomvula

Nomvula came to me in February last year. She was twenty six, a nurse at Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital, working shifts that changed every week. She had been offered a post at a clinic out past Mqanduli, and the condition was simple. She needed a driver's licence within six months, because the clinic sometimes needed her to drive the vehicle out to villages for immunisation days.

She had never driven anything. Not a bicycle on a road, not her uncle's bakkie in a yard. The first time she got into my car she gripped the steering wheel at ten and two so hard her knuckles went grey, and she did not let go for the whole forty five minutes, even when we were stopped.

I liked her immediately. She was funny without meaning to be. She apologised to the car when she stalled it. She named the clutch "the troublemaker."

The Lessons That Did Not Line Up

The trouble was her shifts. She would book a lesson for a Tuesday afternoon and then phone me at six in the morning to say she had been called in. She would arrive on a Saturday straight from a night shift, eyes red, and want to practise the alley dock. She would have cash one week and nothing the next because her salary went to her mother in Tsolo and her younger brother's fees at Walter Sisulu University.

By May she owed me for eleven lessons. I had a circle on her page that I kept going over in pen until it nearly tore the paper.

I did not want to stop teaching her. But I was starting to dread the end of every lesson, that small awkward moment where she would open her bag and look inside it and I would pretend to be adjusting my mirror. Neither of us wanted to talk about it. That moment was spoiling something good between us.

A Conversation at the Spaza Shop

The thing that changed it was a conversation with Mr Dlamini, who runs the spaza shop where I buy my airtime. I was complaining, in a general way, about learners who could not pay when they saw me. He laughed and pointed at the little device on his counter and said half the people in his area paid their accounts and municipal bills at shops like his now, whenever they had money in their hand, and the money just went where it needed to go.

I had seen people doing that for years without thinking about it. I just never imagined it had anything to do with a woman with one Corolla and an exercise book.

My nephew, who does something with computers in Durban, explained it to me over the phone on a Sunday. He said there are companies whose whole work is helping small businesses get paid in ways that suit the customer, not just the seller. He used the phrase payment solutions provider and I made him spell it so I could write it on the inside cover of the lion book. He said that for someone like me, the point was not fancy technology. It was letting a learner pay a little at a time, from wherever she happened to be, without either of us having to stand in a car park counting coins.

What I Actually Did

I am not quick with these things. It took me most of June to understand the options and choose something, and I asked my nephew far too many questions. In the end I set things up so that each learner could get a reference number from me and pay toward their lessons at a till, on their phone, or at a shop near their home, whenever they had the money. I could see on my own phone who had paid and how much.

Looking back, the payment solutions part was the easy bit. The hard bit was telling my learners, many of whom had paid me cash for years, that there was another way now. Some of the older ones did not trust it. A grandmother of one of my learners came to Sutherland Street personally to make sure I was not a scam. I made her tea from my flask and showed her the lion book. She approved of the lion book more than anything else.

Nomvula's Turn

When I told Nomvula, she went quiet in the driver's seat. Then she said, "So I can pay you at two in the morning from the staff room?"

I said yes.

She started paying fifty rand here, eighty there, whenever a shift ended. Sometimes at strange hours. I would wake up and see that she had paid at three forty in the morning, and I would know exactly what kind of night she had had. By August the circle on her page had become a tick.

But the change I did not expect was how she drove. Without that awkward minute at the end of every lesson, she relaxed. She stopped apologising to the car. She started laughing when she stalled. She let go of ten and two.

The Test

She failed her first test in September. She hit the pole on the alley dock. She failed the second one in October, same pole, I am nearly sure. She sat in my car afterward outside the testing station and cried with her forehead on the steering wheel, and I held the back of her neck the way my mother used to hold mine.

I told her what I tell all of them. The pole does not know who you are. The pole is just a pole.

We practised the alley dock every lesson for three weeks. Sometimes twelve times in one session. I put a red bucket where the pole would be, and she named it "the troublemaker's cousin."

She passed in November. I was not allowed in the car with her, so I stood outside by the fence like a mother at a school gate. When she came out she was not smiling. She walked all the way up to me with a completely straight face, and then she held up the slip and screamed.

What I Understand Now

People sometimes ask me whether changing how I get paid made a difference to the business. It did. Fewer circles in the lion book, less petrol money coming out of my own pocket. But that is not the thing I think about.

I think about how much of my teaching I had been doing with one part of my mind waiting for the end of the lesson. I think about how a young woman with a shaking grip could not fully relax in a car while she was also wondering if she would be embarrassed in five minutes' time. Money between people who like each other is a heavy thing to carry in a small space.

I am still not a person who talks about business. If somebody asks me which payment provider I use, I tell them, and then I tell them about Nomvula, which is the part they actually remember.

The Photograph on My Dashboard

She drives the clinic vehicle out past Mqanduli now, on dirt roads I would think twice about. In March she sent me a photograph of herself standing next to it, wearing her uniform, one hand on the bonnet, with a cooler box of vaccines on the seat behind her.

I printed it at the Pep near the rank and stuck it on my dashboard next to my granddaughter's sticker. When a new learner sits down for the first time and grips the wheel too hard, I point at it.

"She hit the pole twice," I tell them. "Breathe."