Butula

Butula is the village where Aaron serves as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the setting for his difficult assignment at Butula Girls’ School. The school’s unruly first-middle-school class and the small house provided for Aaron make the place a testing ground for his expectations, while his friendship with Grace gives him a companion who knows the village and its school from the inside.

School and Local Reputation

Butula Girls’ School is known among its teachers for the exploits of the Girls of First Middle School. Their reported history includes locking a teacher in the boys’ bathroom for an entire night, leading a school-wide work slowdown after the cafeteria served githeri for ten days in a row, and an incident involving a goat in the pantry. When Aaron is assigned to the class, teachers greet him with sympathy; one young colleague is so moved by his apparent misfortune that she cries while telling others about it. The school’s reputation precedes Aaron’s experience of it, making his placement seem less like an ordinary teaching assignment than an ordeal already understood by everyone around him.

The teachers’ advice is correspondingly bleak: they suggest that the girls cannot be reasoned with and jokingly frame the problem as demonic possession, ending with a gesture that means beating them. The account presents this as the staff’s resigned response to a class regarded as impossible to manage, not as a solution Aaron accepts. His own subsequent complaints—to the principal—describe the girls throwing things, mimicking him, asking vulgar questions, refusing homework, and failing to show him respect.

Aaron’s Home and Grace’s Visits

The school provides Aaron with a cramped, foul-smelling house in Butula. He tells Grace that the arrangement is simply what comes with his volunteer placement, although he has complained forcefully to his Peace Corps supervisors from the first day. The condition of the building makes his dissatisfaction tangible: bat droppings fall on him from the doorframe, and he later finds a dried bat carcass trapped in the oven.

Grace, a nineteen-year-old local woman and former student at Butula Girls’ School, has adopted Aaron during his first week in the village. She first turns up at his door with a warm Coca-Cola and a slightly burnt chapati. She mocks his Texas origins by observing that he does not match her expectation of a large, cowboy-like Texan, and she refuses to be impressed by school stories she already knows from her own time at Butula. Her familiarity makes her a link between Aaron’s new surroundings and their history: she understands the students’ reputation rather than merely hearing about it from the teachers.

After dark, Grace slips into Aaron’s narrow, musty house, protesting that she has come unwillingly and that spending time in such a hovel is beneath them both. Despite her professed dislike of the place, she often stays past midnight, watching Aaron across the table under the lamp. He privately wonders whether she will make a romantic advance and thinks about how he might respond, but she does not do so in the encounters described. At the end of an evening, she gets up, yawns, and casually adjusts a bra strap that has slipped out of her dress sleeve. The house is therefore not only an uncomfortable official lodging but also the setting for the tentative, unresolved pattern of their visits.

Campus and Narrative Significance

The campus is where Aaron tries to turn his mounting frustration into an appeal for help. After a good night’s sleep, he goes to the principal’s office instead of his classroom and lists the class’s offenses. The principal initially greets him by asking how his malaria is; Aaron corrects him, saying it was not malaria and that he is feeling better, before explaining that the girls’ conduct is out of control. When Aaron recounts the episode at his house, the principal drops the front legs of his chair back to the floor with a loud thud, a physical sign that the report has changed the tenor of the conversation.

Butula’s settings connect the public and private pressures of Aaron’s assignment: the school gives him a class with an established reputation, the campus becomes the place where he seeks institutional intervention, and his inadequate house is the scene of both hardship and Grace’s repeated company. Through these linked places, the village is rendered not as a backdrop alone but as the environment that shapes Aaron’s isolation, his dependence on local knowledge, and his uneasy adjustment to the role he has come to fill.