What a woman named Madame Zipporah taught me about being worth feeding

At Mahemas Primary School, the library was really just the deputy headmistress's office, a cramped room where the few worn books we owned sat on the same shelves as her paperwork. Her name was Madame Zipporah, and for reasons I still do not fully understand, she decided a barefoot boy from Manyonyi was worth calling into that room.

She would give me tea and bread while I read, actual hot tea and soft bread, which was not a small thing in a house where a full pot on the table was never guaranteed. She praised my work openly, in front of the other pupils, and a poor child who is visibly liked by a teacher will follow that teacher into almost anything. What she led me into was reading.

I did not understand at the time that this was an intervention. It felt like kindness, which it was, but it was also the first door anyone had held open for me that did not have a cane waiting on the other side of it. In a school where a wrong answer cost you strokes at the board, her office was the one room where being curious was never punished.

I do not know if Madame Zipporah remembers any of this. I suspect she does not, because to her it was probably one small kindness among thousands she has shown children over a long career. To me it bent the whole curve of my life. I have spent every year since looking for more rooms like that one, and trying, when I get the chance, to be the adult holding the door for somebody else's version of that boy.

A classmate named Hassan Omar once paid a 25-shilling exam fee out of his own pocket so I would not be turned away from a test my family could not afford for me to sit. He has probably forgotten it completely. I never will. The biggest debts of a life are so often the smallest amounts, paid by exactly the right person at exactly the moment you could not pay them yourself.