The other teacher

Isabelle liked to observe.

She liked to watch the women selling mangoes and the men playing chess and drinking coffee on the corner of old Dar-es-Salam road.  She liked to watch the Massai coming into town to buy credit for their mobile phones at the weekend.  She liked to watch the cars driving past Morogoro, or the trains on their way to Malawi.  She would buy a juice after class, at Rick’s Café, and correct her students’ papers while watching the world at the same time, the people and the things.

Thomas Ray O’Hara felt uncomfortable when Isabelle stared into nothingness, but she liked the detail and he himself had taught her the phrase, “the devil is in the detail” so he shouldn’t have minded at all.  He wasn’t a qualified teacher, but what he lost in facts or knowledge, he made-up with in good intentions.  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” was another of the proverbs he taught her, this time driving out of Morogoro and into the countryside towards Mikumi.

She liked accompanying him on their drives into the countryside and it was there she could observe him the most.  They left for weekends, staying at the safari lodges for tourists for the first few times, but afterwards they had to stay in motels for truck drivers.  It seemed, that all teachers, even the foreign ones, had to economise at times.  She enjoyed sex with him more than she thought she would, it was different than with other men, more natural and less filmic.

Only good things come in detail, not the devil.

Thomas Ray O’Hara, an American with Irish ancestry, was the new guy in Morogoro.  He told the other teachers that he was from Tampa, Florida and that was one eighth Irish.  Americans always liked to tell you exactly where they came from and where their great grandparents before them came from too.  She was from Morogoro, as were her family before her and for as long as time could be.  Apart from three years at Teaching College in Arusha, this is where she would always be.

She liked to look at his hands.

He moved his hands around his face and hair dramatically when he spoke, or taught his classes and while at first she found this to be slightly unhygienic, in a short while it became hypnotic.  She liked the shape of his finger nails, especially his thumb nails which were so neat, and rounded and clean.  She liked the sound of his voice and his confident vocabulary and the way he made everyone listen to him; his students and the other teachers.  Even when he didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say, he commanded a crowd.  And she liked watching him play the guitar, sometimes he sang at parties even though his voice was neither strong nor melodious.  She couldn’t imagine any of her Tanzanian male friends enjoying walking and climbing and cycling or acting as child-like as he.

Most of the volunteer teachers from America were young, but Thomas Ray O’Hara was a man in his forties, although his hair was still black and the lines on his face simply made him look kind.  When she first met him she felt a tenderness towards him, and she noticed almost immediately that she didn’t like it when he gave the other, younger teachers his attentions.  She liked him to talk to her in the school, and to give only her the benefit of his teaching observations.

Once he’d seen her teach he approached her after her class and said “you’re a good teacher Isabelle”.  From this compliment she spent even longer preparing her classes, going over her lesson plans, making sure all corners were covered and ideas explored.  He liked her classes more and more, and even suggested that some of the younger teachers watch her teaching, instead of him.  She became his regular assistant.

The only thing she didn’t like about him was his lack of apology.

One Sunday evening, after a weekend in a motel near Mikumi, he was packing his things into his small rucksack so that they could drive back to Morogoro.  As he did so he dropped his t.shirt onto the ground and down fell Isabelle’s reading glasses.  The lenses were fine and not scratched at all, but the frames were weakened and bent and they needed to be fixed.  Thomas Ray O’Hara simply picked them up and put them back on the bed without saying a word.  He finished his packing, took the car keys from the coffee table and said, “you ready to leave?”

She said that she was and they did.

All the way home she watched the trucks and the mini-vans heading towards Dar-es-Salam and realised that at the end of the semester, Thomas Ray O’Hara would return to Tampa, Florida and she would stay where she was.  She put her head out of the car and felt the rush of cool air on her face.  The dust from the road rested on her hair and eye-brows and she smelt the fully grown maize plants from the fields.   They would need harvesting soon, it was almost time.