I was grading papers one afternoon when a boy I did not know walked into my woodworking classroom. He came to my desk and waited there politely for me to look up from what I was doing. I looked up and smiled at him.

Me: Yes?

Boy: My name is Sabelo.

Me: Hi Sabelo. What can I do for you?

Sabelo: I would like to build a guitar.

Me: Ok.

I kept grading papers. He was not a woodworking student. He looked familiar, but I didn’t know him. He kept standing there expectantly. I looked up again.

Me: Do you mean that you wish to build a guitar today?

Sabelo: Oh, no, sir. I mean that I would like to come here in the afternoons, after classes, and build a guitar.

All I had, wood wise, was rough sawn yellow pine boards. As far as I knew, yellow pine was not a good material for guitars. I had never seen one built out of pine. And building a guitar required specialized techniques, and tools which I did not have. It required having thin strips of wood, which would be soaked and bent around a guitar form, and dried into the shape, and then glued together. I was a pretty good woodworker, but building a guitar was pretty much, way above my skill set. He seemed confident. Maybe he was a secret maestro, that unbeknownst to me, was a guitar builder, and just needed a place to work.

Me: Um, I am not sure that we have the tools necessary for guitar building here. And what wood I have, is not good wood for something like that.

Sabelo: Oh, sir, I have all the materials that I need. All I need is some tools and a place to work.

Me: Do you have any woodworking experience? You are not one of my woodworking students. Do you know how to use the tools that we have here?

Sabelo: I have learned about the woodworking tools from my brother, Wiseman, who is one of your form 4 students.

Ah, that is why he looked familiar. He had a family resemblance to Wiseman, who, by the way, was neither wise, nor a man. Wiseman was a marginal woodworking student, who barely got by in my class, and was more of a trouble maker than anything else. I couldn’t imagine him teaching anybody anything about woodworking. He struggled to get passing grades.

Me: I don’t know, Sabelo. I don’t usually let students who are not in my classes use the tools that we have here. Why are you not a woodworking student?

Sabelo: I am not a woodworking student because when the teachers decided which course of studies I was to follow, and I told them that I wished to take technical subjects, they said no, that my grades in my classes are too high, and I should take college preparatory classes, like Geography, and History, and Civics, and leave the technical subjects for the dumb boys. So that is what I am doing.

Kids can be so bluntly honest. The dumb boys. My experiences with my students had shown me that the teachers, when advising students on what classes they should take in high school, were more likely to advocate woodworking for the students who had been behavior problems in their primary school classes, and my woodworking classes were full of them. They were not mini Einsteins, but by no means were they dumb. And woodworking is uniquely suited to those kinds of boys, as, at least half the time, they were busy building things, and when a boy has his hands busy, he is less likely to be causing problems with other students. I didn’t have many behavior problems in my classes for several reasons. One was that I was taller than everybody in the community. Maybe in the country. Another was that I was not a Swazi, and culturally, I was so strange, that most boys were… well… cautious around me. Until I won them over with my winning personality. And on the rare occasion that I did have a behavior problem, me suggesting that a student should put his project on hold, and instead write an essay on how their disruptive behavior made class harder for everybody, was usually enough to nip disruptive behavior in the bud. For really egregious misbehavior, an afternoon spent hauling cement blocks two at a time, from where they were making them up by the primary school, to down by the high school where they were building some new classrooms, in the hot sun, was a very efficacious modifier. Wiseman had hauled blocks several afternoons.

Swazi school infrastructure had been set up by the British, who believed in caning students for misbehavior, and most of the other teachers relied on it. As far as I could tell, caning a student was not an effective behavioral modifier. My classes were regularly interrupted by a student knocking at the door, and when I would ask them what they wanted, they would say… “Sir. My teacher sent me to get a stick for her to beat me with.” And I would point to the scrap pile, and go on with my teaching. I knew from personal experience, that “caning”, in the form of my fathers fist swinging down from the sky and crashing into my head, had only made me resent him. I eschewed the corporal punishment mentality prevalent in my school. Instead, I gave the offenders some time to think about whether they wanted to behave or not. So far, so good.

Me: Well, Sabelo, you seem very earnest in your desire to build a guitar. I fear that I am not the one to instruct you in the details of building such a complicated project as a guitar.

Sabelo: Oh, sir, I have what I need. I just need some tools, and a place to work.

Me: Ok, I will make you a deal. I will let you work here after school for one week. In that week, it will be up to you to show me that you can use the tools safely and effectively, and I will observe you, and help where I can. If you do well in that week, then I will give you the freedom to complete your project. Is that fair to you?

Sabelo: Oh yes, sir. You will see. I will start on monday after school.

Monday afternoon Sabelo came in to my classroom, carrying a relatively straight branch from a Sithwethwe tree. Sithwethwe trees are the ones you see in National Geographic, that look like umbrellas. I knew that it was a relatively hard wood, and much in demand for firewood, as it burns hot and long. I left him free to go to work, only asking him to let me teach him if he did not know how to use a tool. I had bought a spokeshave about 6 months before, to use to soften the square edges on things like chair legs, and that was the first tool that Sabelo chose. I watched him work with it to start to shape the tree branch, and he seemed to be doing ok, so I put my time into helping other students who had come in after school to work on their projects. As the week wore on, Sabelo was great. He got along with anybody else who was there working, and indeed, many of them were already friends with him. He worked industriously for the hour that I kept the woodshop open after school each day. By the end of the week, he had proved to be an able, if inexpert woodworker, and his Sithwethwe branch had become shaped like a guitar neck, flat on top, and rounded on the bottom. It had a wide part on one end, and he had laboriously carved it to look like where tuning keys would go, and drilled 6 holes, and was carving pegs to fit tightly in the holes. Just the novelty of what he was building had started several conversations among the students working on their projects, and they swapped ideas and stretched their minds, and I was all in favor of that. I started wishing that Sabelo was actually one of my students. He had a natural ability in working wood.

Toward the end of the second week, his guitar neck was looking great. He had smoothed it, and had taken a sharpie, and drawn lines across the flat top of the neck where the frets would be. His pegs fit the holes nicely, ready to hold strings. The next day, he brought a 2 gallon rectangular can like the ones you could buy cooking oil in. Over the next week, he cut a hole in one end, into which he stuck the lower end of the neck he had made, and fastened it with a collection of mismatched screws he had found somewhere. And he drilled holes in the face of the can, into which he would attach the bottoms of the strings. I was pretty impressed. He had a small picture of a guitar that he had cut out of a magazine, and he referred to it as he worked. The last step, he took some small scraps of wood, and with my pocket knife, had whittled a nut, and a bridge, which would work at each end to hold the strings up off the neck. He asked me if I would give him paint, to paint it, and selected a quart of black Rustoleum that I had brought back from town, and proceeded to paint the can and the bottom of the neck. We left it to dry in the woodshop, and went home for the weekend.

Monday afternoon, I asked him if he had strings. He had 4 strings, all of which were rusty and not in very good shape. I had just changed the strings on my guitar, and had saved the old strings, so I went to my house, and got them, and gave them to him. He lit up like a light, and got to work stringing the guitar. He tied the bottom ends, and wrapped the top ends around the pegs, turning the pegs and tapping them in, and loosening them, and tapping them back in, as he tuned up the instrument. It was a very laborious process, but finally, just as I was about to call a halt so I could go up to my house and make dinner, he came over to me, smiling a huge smile, and said, “I will play a song for you, Mr. Maseko, to thank you for letting me build my guitar in your shop.” The other students working that afternoon, gathered around. And Sabelo started strumming his guitar and singing.

He had a great voice as he sang some traditional song that he knew. On the other hand, the guitar sounded like he was whaling away at a bag full of cats with a big stick. It was sublimely discordant and whangy buzzy sounding. He whaled away at it for 5 minutes, and sang with his beautiful soft tenor. It was an amazing performance, and I, and the other students, gave him a standing ovation when he was done. He went home that day with a grin on his face. I felt like he would probably go far in life.

. Sabelo

Takin a chance on people Matters