Tlaleng

                The first time that I saw her, I thought she was a boy. 

Tlaleng was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt, which is the usual boys’ uniform at our school.  She had a high, wrinkled forehead that looked like she was always raising her eyebrows.  Her jawline was strong and defined, and her lips were always curled up in a wry smile.  Every time she talked to me, she tilted her head down and peered up at me through thin, shy eyelashes.  The way she was always stealing glances at me during morning assembly and class, I thought she was just a nervous 7^th grade boy.

                Within the first few weeks at school, I knew she’d be a special student.  One day, she came to me at lunch with a poem to read.  It was called “In My Life”.  The first few lines went something like this: “In my life, I have suffered/I have seen many things/Happening to me, in my life/But what could I do?  Nothing, because I was too young”. 

                I read it and didn’t know how to respond.  I didn’t know if she wanted my opinion on her grammar usage, or if this was a cry for help.  I told her that it was great work and that it takes a lot of courage for a poet to write about traumatic events in life.  She smiled and said “thank you madam” and walked out of the room.  Thereafter, I was the one caught stealing glances at her during class.  I was completely captivated by her.

                Tlaleng lost her mother some years back.  I don’t know when and I don’t know how.  She lives with her father now, in a village somewhere near our school.  To my knowledge, she doesn’t have any siblings.  I know she was very close to her mother.  She talks a lot about playing with her mother’s hair while she was still alive.

                 Tlaleng’s English is excellent.  It’s nearly the best of all the students in my class.  She sits in the front row towards the left side of the room.  Even though she’s brilliant, she is very shy about answering out loud in class.  Only when I’ve asked a very difficult question with no response from the rest of the class will she raise her hand and self-consciously answer me correctly.  She shuffles her feet while she answers, and always says “I think that…” before explaining her reasoning.

                When I connected my 7^th grade class to my sister’s class in America last semester to be pen pals, I immediately decided that Tlaleng should write to my sister Lindsay.  I wanted Tlaleng to know that I had chosen her to be Lindsay’s pen pal and that she was special. 

I only came to find out after reading our first round of letters that Tlaleng is 19-years old.

                This morning, while I was walking to school with my principal, she told me that last Friday Tlaleng had decided to drop out of school.  I felt like my heart was breaking.  She told her classmates that she wanted to instead attend a traditional “initiation school” in the mountains.  She wanted a female circumcision and to learn how to become a real Mosotho woman.

                The other teachers at my school had obviously noticed how remarkably clever Tlaleng is, and they were infuriated with her.  Leaving early from classes on Friday, they marched over to Tlaleng’s house and demanded that her father take responsibility for her decision and force her to come back to school.  They even threatened to have him arrested by the police if he didn’t ensure that she was back in classes on Monday.

                Sure enough, Tlaleng was at school today before 8am.  Her father also came, accompanied by an uncle of hers, to discuss Tlaleng’s behavior.  I was called into the office to talk to Tlaleng and her father directly.  It was shocking to see Tlaleng’s family; she is so intelligent and well-spoken, and her father was dirty and wore an old farmer’s suit and had an unshaven, ratty beard.  It made me wonder what her mother was like.  Since he didn’t speak English, the principal translated what I said.

                While she peered up at me through those eyelashes, I told Tlaleng that she was one of the most intelligent girls I knew.  I told her that she would be ridiculous to throw away all of her talents by leaving school in the 7^th grade.  I told her that I knew she would go to high school—and even college—if she kept working hard in her classes, hard enough to earn scholarships.  I told her that, in a country like this, education is everything.  If she wanted to work for the Ministry of Education to help orphans like herself, as she had told me once in one of her compositions, then she needed to complete 7^th grade at the very least.

                She promised me she’d stay in school.