Aaron

Aaron’s story follows an inexperienced Peace Corps volunteer whose attempt to teach at Butula Girls’ School is overwhelmed by classroom humiliation, isolation, and a strange nocturnal pursuer. His decisive turn comes not through mastering the school or asserting authority, but when he abandons the threat of violence and runs after Grace, the person who has both mocked and befriended him.

Identity and Assignment

Aaron is a volunteer with the Peace Corps, assigned to teach the first-year class at Butula Girls’ School. The school’s teachers regard the assignment as a misfortune: the class has a reputation for misbehavior, and its past exploits include locking a teacher in the boys’ bathroom overnight, leading a schoolwide work stoppage after repeated servings of githeri, and an incident involving a goat in the pantry. One young teacher is so sorry for Aaron that she cries while describing his prospects to colleagues.

When Aaron asks for advice on dealing with the girls, one teacher’s fatalistic answer is that they cannot be reasoned with and that the only remaining option is to beat them. The recommendation establishes the disciplinary culture surrounding his assignment, but Aaron will not drag the students from the classroom and whip their tender calves. His reluctance is treated as unusual among the teachers who have also been through the class; it leaves him without the violent means they regard as practical, while the girls quickly discover how exposed he is when he turns away.

The Classroom and Its Escalation

The girls’ behavior becomes a daily campaign of ridicule. They imitate Aaron’s voice in an exaggerated nasal register, call to him in the same manner, and throw objects ranging from chalk to spit-soaked paper, maize seeds, hairpins, and balls of green mucus. He cannot even turn to write a lesson on HIV transmission on the board without the teasing breaking into disorder.

The humiliation is not confined to disruption. After Aaron returns corrected exercises, Roda Kudondo approaches his desk and throws her notebook into his face, mocking his Texan pronunciation with indistinct sounds. When he orders her back to her seat, she repeats the sounds, pushes a finger into her mouth to distort her cheek, and makes an explicit sexual proposition in exchange for a higher grade. The class applauds as she calmly returns to her place. Aaron is left stunned and flushed, unable to understand the performance at first and then forced to absorb its public meaning. The incident adds another humiliation to the sequence that keeps him awake at night, dreading morning.

Linnet’s meowing is another episode Aaron later recounts to the principal. He also tells him about the girls’ insults, refusal to do homework, vulgar questions, and the objects thrown at him. The principal initially listens while leaning back in his chair; Aaron’s account of the nighttime attack on his home makes him set the chair’s front legs down with a bang. By then Aaron is not simply asking for classroom discipline: the trouble has crossed the boundary between school and his private life.

The Night Runner and Grace

One night, after Aaron has finally fallen asleep, persistent knocking wakes him. The lamp is out, and he makes his way blindly from beneath the mosquito net to the entrance. He imagines an emergency—perhaps an attack or a rebel invasion, with the Peace Corps arriving by helicopter to rescue him—but when he unbars the door, nobody is there. The knocks had sounded only seconds before; the moonlit courtyard is empty, the gate shut, and everything still. Outside, the air smells of charcoal and manure, and Aaron hears only his own labored breathing.

Grace challenges the way he responds to such events. When he complains, she tells him he is too serious and argues that being meowed at or having someone knock at night is not the worst thing in the world. Aaron asks her to be more sympathetic, but her teasing is also part of a relationship in which she tells him stories and unsettles him while remaining unafraid of him. She does not simply soothe him: she laughs at his fears, and he is left negotiating the difference between her humor and the real helplessness he feels.

After a night without Grace, the Night Runner returns. The next morning Aaron is first surprised to find the veranda clean, then overwhelmed by a stench; along the white walls of his house runs an unbroken, hardened brown streak at thigh height. He calls his Peace Corps supervisor and says he has been harassed in the village, feels he has nothing more to offer the community, and wants to go home. He expects to be talked out of leaving, but instead the supervisor asks whether he feels in danger or is considering harming himself. When he says no, she tells him to come to the office the next day to complete resignation papers. His departure is accepted with startling efficiency.

Refusal, Departure, and Ending

On the night before the paperwork, Aaron stays inside in oppressive heat, afraid to open the windows. He sits on his mattress in his underwear with a long, flat grass-cutter taken from the yard shed in his lap. Although he has told his supervisor he does not feel endangered, he recognizes that he is uneasy, humiliated, powerless, and tired of feeling that way. When knocking begins just after midnight, it moves from door to window and around the house too quickly to belong to one person. He imagines the entire first-year class has come on a cruel outing and recalls Mercy looking toward him at the flagpole. Even when he had been angry enough to beat her, she had not feared him; now he sees himself crouched on the bed like a coward.

Aaron shoulders the grass-cutter like a baseball bat and moves toward the door, but the scene turns away from confrontation. Grace runs naked across the courtyard, visible to him alone, and Aaron runs after her, agile as a cat. He is still due to leave the next day for the long journey home; the story does not show whether he completes that departure. Instead, it ends with the pursuit, a final movement that reverses his earlier posture of fearful vigilance. He does not overcome the Night Runner or resolve his place in the village. He chooses, for that night, to follow Grace rather than remain enclosed with the weapon.

Narrative Role

Aaron’s episode places the authority of a foreign volunteer beside his actual vulnerability. He has been assigned the role of teacher, yet the school’s prevailing advice offers force as the only means of control, and his refusal leaves him exposed to ridicule and disorder. His lesson on HIV transmission, the students’ mockery of his accent, and his inability to make the classroom obey all mark the distance between institutional responsibility and practical command.

The night scenes extend that disorientation beyond the classroom. Knocking with no visitor, a clean veranda beside a foul-smelling streak, and a house surrounded by rapidly shifting blows give Aaron no stable explanation or opponent to confront. His decision to leave is therefore both a response to sustained humiliation and a recognition of his own limits. The ending does not turn that decision into a triumphant rescue or a settled transformation: tomorrow’s journey home remains imminent, while the last action is a brief, unexplained run with Grace.