Butula Girls' School

Butula Girls' School is more than the workplace assigned to Aaron, a Peace Corps volunteer: it is an institution where unruly student conduct, customary physical discipline, and adult interpretations of local belief collide. The school's reputation for surviving the First Middle School girls' mischief shapes Aaron's daily experience, while its disciplinary customs culminate in his public attempt to cane a student. Later, during a semester-ending celebration on the grounds, the school becomes the setting for a reversal in which Aaron himself is hailed as a night runner.

Reputation and School Culture

The school's teachers know the First Middle School class as a notorious presence. Stories circulate among the staff about the girls locking a teacher in the boys' bathroom overnight, organizing a strike after being served githeri in the dining hall for ten days running, and an incident involving a goat in the pantry. When Aaron receives the class, colleagues meet him with pity; one young teacher is so distressed by his supposed misfortune that she cries while recounting it in the staff cafeteria. This shared lore presents the school's reputation as something its adults pass along before the new teacher has even faced the students.

The class's behavior is described as a sustained challenge to classroom authority, not a single outbreak. The girls mock Aaron's voice, throw chalk and spit-soaked paper, and pelt him with maize kernels, hairpins, and wads of mucus. They refuse assignments and make vulgar provocations. When Roda Kudondo throws a corrected exercise book in Aaron's face and imitates his Texan accent, the class laughs; Aaron, unable to understand the performance, orders her back to her seat. The school's reputation thus takes concrete form in repeated acts that isolate him as both the target of ridicule and an outsider to the students' jokes.

Discipline and Authority

The surrounding school culture offers Aaron a stark model for dealing with the class. A teacher, asked for advice, says the girls cannot be reasoned with and gestures toward beating them. The account indicates that corporal punishment is familiar at the school: teachers have all passed through the same class, and previous punishments have left dozens of canes scattered on the grass. Aaron is unusual among the teachers because he fears dragging the girls outside and striking their tender calves. His reluctance means that even turning to write on the board can allow the class's mockery to grow into chaos.

After a night of harassment at his home, Aaron reports the girls' behavior to the headmaster, listing the insults, thrown objects, refusal to work, and disrespect. The headmaster's response exposes the institution's assumptions as much as its authority. He treats the nocturnal disturbance as a community problem associated with night runners, then tells Aaron that a teacher must discipline a student who meows at him. The advice does not lead to a measured resolution: Aaron returns to class, takes Mercy Akinyi by the arm after the girls meow at him, and drags her into the courtyard as the others swarm around them.

In front of the school, Aaron follows the customary procedure described in the story: he lays Mercy face down, raises her arms above her head, and places her hands on the flagpole. The teachers, drawn by the commotion, make no effort to stop the girls or intervene. Aaron picks up a cane from the grass and presses it against Mercy's leg, but when she smiles weakly and whispers another meow, the threatened punishment has not restored his authority. The scene makes the school's disciplinary order visible while showing how little control it gives him over the students' performance of defiance.

Night Runners and Local Belief

The school's authority also operates alongside beliefs that Aaron does not initially understand. After hearing about his ordeal, Grace identifies the nighttime visitor as a night runner, a figure she describes as common among the Luhya: a person who runs naked, knocks on doors, and may leave a humiliating mess. She insists that night runners are human beings afflicted by a demonic mental disorder, not spirits, and tells Aaron that a captured runner was nearly lynched before the community discovered that the person was a respected pastor's wife. Her account makes the school and its staff part of a community where folklore can shape how an incident is understood.

Aaron's skepticism begins to weaken as Grace elaborates, though her laughter makes it uncertain how far she is teasing him. At school, the headmaster adopts the night-runner explanation without hesitation, blending it with his advice about classroom discipline. The tale's logic also returns at the semester's end. After Aaron chases a girl into the dark, the changing outline of her shadow recalls Grace's stories of runners who can become animals. He crosses the grounds and finds the First Middle School girls alongside students from other grades at a celebration, gathered around a fire and eating roasted goat. The familiar campus setting has shifted from classroom and punishment ground to communal festivity.

The School as Setting and Reversal

At the celebration, the girls first see Aaron as a frightening figure and then mock him as a night runner. The reversal draws together the school's earlier episodes: the girls' meowing, Grace's explanation, the headmaster's advice, and Aaron's own pursuit through the night. The campus, with its flagpole and familiar buildings, is not merely a backdrop; its ordinary features help Aaron recognize where he has arrived after the chase. He remembers that he is the pursuer, not the pursued, even as the students' taunt places him inside the story that had unsettled him.

The next day he is due to leave on the long journey home, and that evening Grace runs naked across the courtyard, visible to him but not to the others. Aaron runs after her, now described as agile as a cat. The school therefore closes his placement not with restored classroom authority but with an intimate reprise of the night-runner motif. Its institutional culture has furnished the conflict, its campus hosts both discipline and celebration, and its students' mockery ultimately turns the volunteer into a participant in the story he had struggled to believe.