A kick by any other name

The classroom doubles as a storeroom. White cardboard boxes from Al Ferdaws Food Industries stacked on bright green ones from Fruitways. A Simba Chips box sits at the very bottom of the pile; so squashed it looks like it’s melting into the floor. It was the period after break-time and we were in the middle of a math game. The ten Grade 6’s in the remedial class competed against each other, using their fingers as aids in their mental arithmetic. My two students stood between them, calling out the simple sums that had the learners’ fingers flicking up and down.

The school uniform is green here, the trim and occasional headscarf grey. The chairs are orange as they always are in schools like this one and the age of the desks is measured not in the concentric circles of the wood but in the scribbles and scratches that cut through those circles.

A light knocking, almost invisible, and the door edges forward. A teacher stands with three little bodies in front of her, and pushes two of them forward.

“Sorry teachers for interrupting,” she tells us and turns to the two little boys, “what are you here to say?”

They are young these two. They stand at the front of the class and their heads hardly reach the bottom of the blotchy green chalkboard. They stand right next to each other, their bodies separated only by static, and the one starts to mumble quietly while the other stands with his hands in front of him, looking a little uncertain.

“We are to say,” he starts in a small voice, a stumbling voice, a voice that hardly fills his softly worn green tracksuit, a voice that rushes out over us in its haste to be out and said and finished; “we are here to say that we are looking for the boy who took his bottle”—he looks to his friend—“and who kicked me on my face.” The boy with the missing bottle glances up and then down again immediately. The boy who mumbled his explanation turns to the teacher for guidance.

“Come! There are boys here.” Her voice is so clear and hard and full in comparison. As her words bounce off the boxed walls of the room I realize I’d been leaning forward to focus on the soft mumbles of the boy. I straighten up and back into my seat. She pulls the two younger boys to the older boys sitting around the low tables closest to the door and demands: “was it them?”

The younger ones look, the older ones smile innocence.

I can hardly hear the “no”.

“Then what do you say?” the teacher asks them.

“Thank you teachers,” the boy who speaks, speaks quietly, so quietly. There is a mark above his right eye, a raised reddish patch. They leave.

“Oh no!” I exclaim as they leave, I can’t help myself. Everyone looks at me in my corner. “They’re just so small,” I defend my outburst. The children laugh. But they were, so small. So sweetly pathetic. Someone stole the silent one’s water bottle, someone kicked the other one on his face.

My response was totally disproportional to the broader context: we’re in Hanover Park, at a school that gets visited by the police daily. When I saw the blue and white van and its flashing lights paused in the staff parking lot, I asked if there was something going on today.  The deputy principal assured me, no: “They come every day. They have to sign to say that they’ve been,” she nibbles a bit on the pink sugared popcorn that the lady who works in the kitchen made for the staff today, “they check-up to see if there’s trouble at school or trouble at home.”

We’re in Hanover Park where rows of fences and rolls of barbed wire mark entrances to public spaces.

“Stop kicking me!” complains one of the boys at the desk across from mine.

“I’m not kicking you!” his neighbor replies. I can hear there is shuffling from under the table. “You’re kicking me!”

“No it’s you, stop kicking me!” the first one repeats.

My student intervenes: “Have you both done the sums?”

“No Miss,” they say, and then settle down.

We’re in Hanover Park where children are children.

Some differences really are just aesthetic, I think to myself. But then again I never saw the police at my school. I guess some differences aren’t.