The Boy Who Finished His Sums Standing Up

The first afternoon

There was a boy called Sipho who would not sit down on the first day. He stood at the end of the long trestle table with his exercise book open, bent over it, writing his sums standing up like a clerk at a counter. I asked him why he would not take a chair and he said his legs were tired from walking but his hand still worked, so he may as well keep his hand busy while his legs had a rest from being sat on all day. I did not fully follow the logic, but I was sixty-one years old and newly retired, and I had spent thirty-four years in classrooms, so I knew better than to argue with a child who had found his own system. I let him stand. He finished every sum correctly. Then he asked me, very politely, whether there was anything to drink.

That is the question I remember. Not the sums, not the standing, but the asking. Is there anything to drink. It was February in our town, the tar soft in the afternoons, and he had walked the better part of three kilometres from the primary school to the church hall where I had set up two tables and a box of secondhand pencils. He was nine. He was thirsty. And I, who had thought so carefully about pencils and about the roster and about asking the dominee for a key, had not thought about water at all.

How the club began

I never meant to start anything. My husband had passed two years before, and the house had become very quiet and very large, the way houses do. My own grandchildren live in another province. I found that I was speaking to the kettle. A woman from the congregation mentioned that the children in the streets behind the hall had nowhere to do their homework, that some of them went home to houses where both parents worked late and the older ones minded the younger ones, and that their marks were slipping not because they were not clever but because nobody was sitting beside them in the afternoons. I said, without really deciding to, that I could sit beside them. I had, after all, been sitting beside children my whole life.

So it began with four of them. Then it was nine. By the winter it was something closer to twenty on the busy days, spilling off the two trestle tables onto the cold floor, and I had roped in a retired bookkeeper named Mrs Dlamini to take the ones who needed help with their reading while I took the sums. We had no budget. We had the hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a tin of koeksisters that somebody's mother sent, and a great deal of goodwill and very little else. What we did not have, I came to understand quite quickly, was water.

The tap that could not be trusted

The hall had a tap. That was the trouble. It looked like a solution, so for a while I pretended it was one. It was in the little kitchen at the back, over a chipped enamel sink, and when it ran it ran a sort of hesitant brown for the first while before it came clear. On a good day it was fine. But we did not have only good days. Our municipality would cut the supply for repairs that stretched on, and there were stretches, two days, three days, once the better part of a week, where you turned the tap and it only sighed at you. The children arrived hot and thirsty regardless of what the municipality was doing. A child who has walked a long way in the heat does not care about a maintenance schedule. A child who is thirsty cannot think. I have watched a bright girl read the same line of a comprehension four times and get nothing from it, and the problem was not the comprehension. The problem was that her mouth was dry and her head was sore and no grown-up had given her a reason to believe the afternoon would take care of her.

I started bringing bottles from home. Two litres at a time, filled at my own kitchen, carried in a shopping bag that cut red lines into my fingers by the time I reached the hall. It was not enough and it was not dignified, mine sloshing warm by three o'clock, the children drinking from the same two plastic cups we rinsed under the untrustworthy tap. I remember thinking that I had not built this little club so that a child would have to ask twice for a sip of warm water from a bag. That was the week I decided the water was not a side issue. The water was the thing.

Solving it properly

A younger cousin of mine runs a small business and keeps one of those tall coolers in his reception, the kind with the upside-down bottle on top that gurgles when somebody draws a cup. I had seen it a hundred times and never once thought about how it worked. When I asked him, he was almost surprised by the question. You just get the dispenser, he said, and then you keep a couple of the big water dispenser bottles going, one on the machine and a spare standing by, and you swap and refill them. It was the spare that undid my whole sense of the problem. A spare. The idea that there could be water waiting, water in reserve, water that did not depend on whether the municipality felt like cooperating that particular Tuesday.

The dispenser itself we found secondhand, a slightly yellowed thing that a closing office let go of cheaply. It was the bottles that mattered, and here I will admit I knew nothing and had to be taught. I had imagined something flimsy. What arrived were sturdy 18.9l water bottles, heavy as a small child when full, the sort you heave up onto the machine with a grunt and a prayer for your back. We started with two and later kept a third. We filled them when the tap was behaving and the water ran clear, and then it did not matter what the tap did for the next few days, because the water was already caught and held and waiting, cool, in the corner of the hall.

I cannot properly describe what that corner did to the room. Mrs Dlamini laughed at me because I kept looking at it. But a thing that is cared for makes a place feel cared for, and the children understood the message long before they could have put it into words. There was a cup for each of them now, their names in marker, hung on little hooks a handyman from the church put up for nothing. A child would come in from the heat, hang up the bag, take down the cup, and draw water, and only then sit to the sums. It became the first thing, the settling thing. You cannot teach fractions to a thirsty child, but give that same child a cold cup of water and five minutes and you have a scholar.

What the water taught me

People hear about the homework club and they want to talk about the marks, and the marks did improve, and I am proud of that. But if you ask me what I am actually proud of, it is smaller than marks. I kept the big water cooler bottles full the way my mother kept a pot on the stove, as a standing promise that whoever walked in would be looked after. There is a dignity in a child never having to ask twice for a drink of clean water. There is a dignity in not having to explain to a nine-year-old that the taps are off again and he must simply be thirsty until he gets home.

Sipho is thirteen now and far too cool for a homework club, though he came by in June to tell me he had been chosen for something at the high school, standing in the doorway, pretending he had only been passing. Before he left he went to the corner out of pure habit, took a cup, and drank, and I had to turn away and fuss with the pencils so he would not see my face. I started this because my house was too quiet. I keep it going because of a cold cup of water in a small hand, and the look on a child's face when the afternoon, at last, takes care of him.