He was brief. I’m not referring to his ability to summarise his speech, no. I’m referring to his size. As soon as we saw him, our first guess was that God had not spent much time creating him. We imagined that mid-way through creation, God was displeased with Mr. Kyendamwanya’s particular sample of human beings and therefore he hurried through the process. And so we laughed hard at Mr. Kyendamwanya’s tiny head, his tiny hands, his sunken tummy and his highly pitched voice the very first time we saw him. Unbeknownst to us was the fact that some of us had indeed already stopped increasing in height and size and in time, we would find out that we were meant to be as brief as he was. But this is not what this story is about. This story is about the only other thing that was briefer than Mr. Kyendamwanya’s exterior; his temper, and how the temper led to the troublesome five dayswe spent with him. Mr. Kyendamwanya’s first phrase was, “Praise God!” It was curious that a new teacher would invoke God’s name in the first few minutes of meeting his new students. Still, we had had stranger first encounters with our educators so we decided to indulge him by shouting “Amen!” in response. We had assumed that a man who had reverence for the Lord would be tolerant of our sinfulness, but we soon learnt that Mr Kyendamwanya was a man of little patience. As soon as we laughed at his name, he blinked ceaselessly and panted and a vein on his head popped out. Now I’m sure that his name, much like other people’s names, quite possibly had a good meaning in his language. Nonetheless, in the language that was most known to us, his name meant ‘ninety-space’ and for all our guessing, we could not point a finger to a particular reason as to why someone would name their child ‘ninety-space.’ When we refused to stop laughing, Mr. Space, (as everyone eventually came to know him), ordered us out of our seats. We spent the rest of the lesson kneeling on the floor. The following day, he found a drawing of a man standing at ninety degrees in space. We wouldn’t give up the name of the culprit and for that reason, we spent the whole lesson with our hands raised high. On the third day, he entered our classroom and found pieces of paper with numbers one to ninety leading up to the space he was supposed to stand while teaching us. He hung us out in the sun to dry. Well, he told us to sleep in the compound facing the scorching sun. On the fourth day, he found a note on the classroom door that read, “There is space in room ninety.” He reported us to the school administration and we spent the rest of the day slashing the school compound. On the last day, he found the blackboard with filled with numbers one to ninety and then a space. He walked away. Mr. Space was replaced with Mr Kapepsi. Mr Kapepsi, like his predecessor, had a short temper. But unlike Mr Space, Mr Kapepsi was a large man. During his first lesson, he slapped a student and the mark of his palm stayed on her face. She didn’t cry. She later swore to us that she saw stars after Mr Kapepsi whacked her face.
