Mid Morning Moon

I first heard about the map from one of my teachers. It was not the kind of information he was supposed to be giving us, but I think he was bored with what he had to do and sometimes drifted away to unexpected topics. He was not our proper teacher, although he was a teacher in a primary school in the town and had a reputation for being learned. His name was Maalim Hassan Abdalla. He had recently moved next door to us and lived in the downstairs rooms he rented from our neighbours, Uncle Abdulrahman and Bi Fatma. We called them uncle and aunt out of respect. They had no children and had the two upper storeys of the house, so did not need the ground floor. Uncle Abdulrahman was a teacher too, but a much grander one. He taught at the secondary school, where all the teaching was done in English, and had studied at Makerere University College, Kampala. At the time, almost all teachers in the secondary school were Europeans, and it gave Uncle Abdulrahman a kind of glamour that he had rubbed shoulders with these legendary ones. He and Maalim Hassan must have known each other from before, or perhaps had even studied together when they were younger.