10. Muku and Steven were up on their feet again! Just then, the bus rammed into another pothole… (P.Zaranyika)

Muku and Steven were up on their feet again! Just then, the bus rammed into another pothole, sending the two staggering and gladly falling onto the laps of some unsuspecting girls. “Muku, Steven, sit down!” I shouted over the roar of the school bus and they hurriedly went back to their seats. I was very annoyed with the students who were singing songs with lyrics containing foul language. Some would stand and dance to the songs while the rest cheered for them. I was even more annoyed with my two colleagues who seemed not to be bothered by the students’ behaviour. They were both so focused on their phones they didn’t even lift their heads when the driver would announce that there were students standing in the moving bus. “Stop singing that song!” I once more shouted. “I should find another job before I go crazy”, I thought to myself as I settled back into my seat.


I looked at the clock and sighed, we still had about 2 hours on the road before we could get to Gweru High School where we were going for provincial athletics competitions. I wondered if I would be able to leave teaching and find another job that would be less stressful and more financially rewarding. My passion for children was slowly vanishing because of the behaviour of Gijima College students. Mr Gutu, the school head was always going out in his school truck to attend to his farm which was about ten kilometres away from the school. The deputy head was a soft-spoken lady who would agree to everything anyone would suggest. How I wished teachers would give suggestions that had students at heart! Teachers would come and go as they pleased. Some would just sit in class on their phones while students were asked to copy notes from multiple textbook pages. As I continued to mull over these things in my head, I dozed off, only to be woken up by the sudden screeching halt of the bus. The sudden stop made my head hit against the back of the seat in front of me. Ramona screamed, she had been scratched by the fork she had been holding. I went to her seat as my two workmates disembarked to see the man who had caused the driver to use emergency brakes.


Ramona was fine, she just had a light scratch and was not bleeding. Several students gathered around her, speaking words of comfort. Others were heading out of the bus and I had to rush to the door to close it and get them to sit down. The driver and my workmates came back into the bus together with the man who had apparently stood in front of the bus. I wondered if the man was a lunatic. His hair was unkempt and the shirt he wore had once upon a time been white. The only vacant seat was the one next to mine. Surely my workmates knew that it was against school policy to give rides to strangers in the school bus. Surely they did not expect me to sit next to him! Well, he came and sat next to me while I looked at the clock. It was approximately 30 minutes before arrival, it promised to be a very long 30 minutes. For the first time, all the students were quiet! I could feel the 56 sets of athletes’ eyes all staring at us, wondering who the mysterious man was and why he was in their bus. Muku who had been seated at the back quietly got a junior student to trade places with him. “Who are you? Why did you stand in front of a moving bus like that?” Muku asked. I was about to ask the very same question. I doubted he could speak English but he all of a sudden responded in perfect English. He said his name was Mr Rio.


Mr Rio was on his way to Gweru High School. He had apparently been flagging down cars for the past hour to get a ride to the school where he taught Art but none had waited for him. “I knew if I flagged you down, you wouldn’t wait for me, so I had to take a drastic action, I stood in front of the bus and here I am, on my way to Gweru”. There was a smug on his face as he crossed one leg on top of the other. I wished I could wipe the smug off his face. Muku had a few more questions to ask then he was off to the back seat where he had the athletes resume their singing. They started throwing in filthy words to their song, which made Mr Rio spring up from his seat and walk to the back of the bus as it went past the last robot. The students scurried to their seats in fear. Something was whispered by Mr Rio which had the students so quiet that my two colleagues looked back and asked if everything was alright. As the bus drove through the gates of Gweru High, the whole bus was still quiet and I wondered what in the world Mr Rio had whispered. I had asked him a couple of times but he refused to tell me. I couldn’t wait to get off the bus and find out from Mako what he had said to them. As the students filed out of the bus in the parking lot, the dirty stranger with unkempt hair remained seated, trapping me in the window seat while smiling at the students as they gave him high fives on their way out. Why did the students like him so much? I wondered if he had bewitched them. Perhaps he bewitched me too, because the dirty stranger I met in the bus to Gweru High is now my husband and father to our two children!

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