Alexander McCall Smith

Acacia

Notwane River

This week I picked up The Kalahari Typing School For Men,  the story of Mma Ramotswe, keeping her business afloat in Gaborone, Botswana.  I sometimes feel like my visit there in college was just a short, passing dream.  I will always remember the stillness, the smells, the sounds.

     '"Those are small things," Mr. Molefelo interjected. "Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I've come to see you , Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you."
      Ma Ramotswe nodded. She unnderstood. Shortly after opening the No. I Ladies' Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this. Be gentle, he had written. Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement of them, but listen. Just listen.
      They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the red earth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of the shrub.  It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions--small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.'