Judy

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Judy

Judy looks at her dresses, wondering which one to wear; it should not be a difficult decision to make, she owns one good dress and two that can be worn in the street.

She has washed very carefully, it is not easy, they have two rooms, they are three women for these two rooms. The water should come from the tap, mostly there is no water and you have to use the bucket water but then the others complain and demand that you go and refill the bucket.

Yesterday her mother and her sister made her hair. She is careful not to touch it.

Shoes are a problem; she will work in an office, they will all be looking at her shoes; but if she wears them, walking through the compound they will get all muddy and they will see that she lives in the compound and have no respect for her.

She will need a handbag, a secretary has a handbag; is she supposed to bring her pencils and a writing pad? In films secretaries always come with pencils and handbag and sit down and cross their legs and show a lot of leg and take dictation. What will he say if he sees that she cannot take dictation?

Does a Secretary carry make-up?

Judy is seventeen, this is her first job, her sister knows the Administrator at the FAO Office in Lusaka, she recommended her, then that M'sungu came to Zambia and now he needs a secretary.

Judy lives in the compound near Lusaka; well, it is not really a compound, a compound is a place where dirty people who drink beer and beat their wives and steal from one another live. No, it is not a compound; it is a residence place for people who have only one salary to live on. But the M'sungus would probably call it a compound, they call compound any house that does not have at least five rooms and a cook and a gardener and a watchman.

That new M'sungu, what does he know about Zambia? What is he going to expect from her? All girls know that the boss, be he Zambian or Foreigner expect a lot from the girls.

Her job will be at the research station. How is she going to travel each day to the Research Station, it is ten miles away and when the buss stops, you still have to walk one mile. You cannot tell when the buss is going to leave, sometimes it leaves because the driver wants to go somewhere, sometimes it does not leave at all, sometimes the police stops the buss and searches everybody and it takes so long and they always manage to steal something.

Today she will be meeting her new boss at the FAO Office, in the Administrator's office. Probably they will then travel to the Research Station in the M'sungus vehicle. All M'sungus have vehicles. They have vehicles and drivers; It is good that they have a driver, then you can speak with the driver and the M'sungu does not understand, so you can ask. But sometimes you have to be careful, the drivers, they expect something back.

Will the M'sungu laugh at her, she is so ashamed of her nose, it is so small, even in Zambia they laugh at her nose. She would not like to have one of these long narrow noses the white women have, that makes them really look ugly and bossy, but she wishes her nose was a bit longer, just a bit.

Today she just has to get to the FAO Office and wait. She will walk the way together with hundreds of other women going to their job. She will, if everything goes well, belong to the women who have a job, who get paid, who can enter into a shop and select something and pay for it.

She knows she is lucky, this will be her first job and already she will be working for International Civil Servants; So many girls would have wanted to get the job and given anything to get it.

On her starting salary she will already earn more than her sister who is a Senior Clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture.

But what if that M'sungu says that she will be given the job on “trial” and he then discovers that she does not type very well, who can afford a typewriter to train, that she does not know shorthand?

Judy walks into the FAO Office, her back is straight, her face is straight, it would not do for anyone to se her smiling, they could think that she is a nothing girl. But she is feeling better, she recognizes some of the girls and sees that they do not have better clothes than she has and they do not appear to be afraid, they go around and they laugh and they speak, like any working place in Lusaka. Many are darker than she is.

She does not know whether she should get around and great all the women, or if she should wait for somebody.

She enters the Office of the Administrator, she knows him well, he has been for so long in Zambia, he is a friend of the family, he understands Zambian ways;

She is introduced to the M'sungu; she tries not to look, she tries to look as if it was everyday that she was meeting M'sungus. This one looks really strange, he has no beautiful clothes, apparently he has even forgotten to comb his hair this morning and either he is lazy or his servant is lazy because his shoes are really so full of mud that you cannot see the shoes. He is smiling a lot, may be he is laughing at her, you cannot know with M'sungus, they laugh when it is not appropriate to laugh, they can even laugh when they are alone, you never know what they mean. Better be careful.

They drive of to the Research Station. They enter into a Land Cruiser which is so old and so bumpy that not even a Zambian would like to drive it. All the upholstery inside has been ripped out; the driver is a Zambian, he treats her with respect, as if she was already a lady, the Secretary of an Important man. That is good. She does not smile at the driver, he must not think that they are on equal level. She does not yet know his tribe for sure. Of course she has seen and he has seen that they both belong to friendly tribes, but even within friendly tribes one has to be careful, all villages do not follow the same rules.

They arrive at the Research Station, they stop near the Main Office. The driver gets out of the car and opens the door for her. That is good. He did not try to stop so that she would set her foot in a water pool when getting out, this is good.

They get into the Research station and the M'sungus shows her the Office where they will be working. It is a very tiny Office, but in that tiny Office there in more equipment than in the whole of the Ministry; Is he going to ask her to do photocopies the first day as they all seem to do? She has never used a photocopier, at her Secretarial School, all the photocopiers were broken and the only one that worked had been borrowed by the Director.

The M'sungu shows her the Office and then shows her which Office she will have. This is good, it is the same size as the first Office.

Judy is then introduced to the Chief of the Research Unit; He is a Zambian, he does not really look like a Chief. He wears just ordinary clothes. He speaks ordinary language. She is a bit envious, which one is the most important, the White Chief or the Zambian Chief ? It is important to know, but they speak to one another as if they were equal, as if they were friends, how can she know which one is the most important?

They go around the other Offices and she is introduced to the other workers of the unit. Judy does not know whether she should be happy or not that there are so few women. If there had been plenty of women, she could have asked questions and found out whom to be careful with, you cannot do that with men.

She spends the day at the Research Station, it is difficult to know what the M'sungu is doing. Sometimes he is there, sometimes he is not there. She is worried about her return trip this evening, will he know that she has to leave in time to get the buss; she has not had time to get friends so she does not know yet where she can get a lift.

In the evening, the M'sungu asks Matafwali, the driver to drive her home. This is good, she will be alone with the driver and then she will be able to ask questions; But she has to be careful, maybe the driver has been instructed to drive her home so that they can see how big is her house and to get her to tell them things they should not know.

The driver, Matafwali drives her home. He is very respectful of her. She instructs him how to drive to her home as if she is used to being driven by a car every day. She tells him that the road will be very muddy and makes him stop five minutes before they reach her home. He asks her whether he should collect her at the same spot tomorrow, she is surprised but she manages to say yes in a superior way, as if it was obvious and the driver should have known it.

She gets home and walking the last five minutes she is already getting nervous. Her mother will ask so many times for all the details. Her mother has been Mistress in a school and she does not want the neighbours to think of her as a woman without a job and without a husband. She wants them to understand that she is an educated woman, who reads the Times of Zambia, who has a pension from the Government and who has chosen to live in the compound so that her daughters will be nearer to the Ministry. She will ask Judy is her boss has bottles of alcohol, if he has said improper things, if it looks as if the others respect her boss or whether he is a little boss. Even a white man can be treated like a little boss and made ridiculous; she would not want Judy to work for a boss who is made fun of.

Judy and her mother will discuss what they should say to the driver. It is good if the neighbours see that Judy is driven by a Government car, but is it dangerous to show too much to the driver, who will he be speaking with?

This is going to be nearly the most important week in Judy's life. She will have to listen to everything, to learn everything; she has to learn and at the same time she has to give the impression that all this teaching is not necessary, that she already knows all these things.

It is her fist job and for her first job she has to work for a white man. This is difficult, you never understand what he mean when he says something. Did he say that because he knew that it meant so much or did he just say that because in his country this was the way they were dong things; everything is so simple and so complicated; the secretary always prepares the tea and brings it to the boss, but where is she supposed to take her tea? Normally she would be with the other girls of the typing pool and they would all gossip and learn, but here there is no typing pool.

Why does her boss always leave the key to his Office open? Does he not know that everything is stolen as soon as you leave? Or is he trying to find out whether she, Judy will be stealing or whether she is good at making sure that the others do not steal from his Office?

The driver, Matafwali is a good man, now she can tell him “stop her” and he will stop here, and she can go out and buy vegetables and sometimes meat. Apparently he does not tell the boss anything.

It was the second day of work and the boss at tea time asked her if she had time to take tea at his house with his wife. Judy did not quite know what to say; if he had been a good Zambian he would never have told her to come to his house unless he had bad intentions. It is not proper for a woman to go to a man's house. But the driver Matafwali, told her that this was the way things were being done here and he told her that he would also be going to the Boss house to get tea and that at the house there would be a cook and a gardener.

They went to the Boss house at tea time, it was a big house, full of rooms, a Government House; He had a cook and a driver and a gardener. When they arrived, two huge black dogs came and started jumping all around the car. It is very improper for dogs to be allowed to go near people, in a good house, the gardener would throw stones and sticks at the dogs, here they were treated as if they were friends, they were even allowed to come and sniff at her.

They went into the house and she met the boss's wife; her dress was not more expensive than the dress Judy was wearing, even if you could see that it came from abroad. You could understand everything she said in English; she did not really know how to be a lady, so that she was smiling at Judy and being friendly.

The boss's wife even took her around the house and the garden, she met the cook and he treated her with respect and the gardener stayed away from them with respect.

They sat down in the house and the cook brought the tea; Judy did not know whether she was expected to serve the tea as she was the youngest or whether she should wait to be served. Judy was thinking that maybe they were not very important people because they did not have friends to tell them where to buy sugar and they even had no salt. They were not very important people because the dogs were allowed to come into the house and were even given bits of biscuits, this is very dirty. Maybe the cook did not tell them because he did not have respect for them?

They had tea and they went back to the Office. Matafwali, the driver had tea in the kitchen with the cook and the gardener. This was very proper.

The week went very fast and Judy was learning. They were so many questions, so many contradictions. When Matafwali was driving her home, were was he driving afterwards, it is good to be a Government driver, in the evening you drive the boss home and then the boss tells you to drive the Government car to the garage and you say “Yes Sir,” and then you can use the car during the evening and earn money driving people her and there, but she looked very carefully and there was no cigarette buts, no papers, no hairpins. One evening she asked him how he got home in the evening and he told her that he drove the Government car to the Ministry parking place and then walked home; Judy did not know whether she should believe him. Nobody does that, it would be very stupid to waste so much money.

Judy thought that as a secretary she would be typing the whole day on an old typing machine, but this boss was funny, he seemed to like to do his typing himself on a computer. This was the first computer Judy had seen. It did not look very complicated yet everybody was asking her whether she knew how to use a computer; she could not answer such a question so she just told them that she had a computer and a printer and a photocopying machine in her Office. This had been a mistake, she did not realize that they all would come to her with important papers they wanted to have copied and they could not understand that she could not copy the papers for them as they knew she was so often alone in her office and could do as she liked, so she told them that there was a padlock on the photocopying machine. They all believed her.

She had been told at her school that a secretary was supposed to type lots of documents and even take short hand under the dictation of her boss and here she was neither typing nor taking short hand; They all wanted her to explain what she was doing then, was she a lazy girl not doing anything and this must mean that her boss had other intentions? It was so difficult to explain that the whole day she was so busy finding documents, sorting papers, getting to town with the Government car, collecting the mail, bringing papers to other Offices, being sent to buy very difficult items.

Apparently the boss expected her to be able to get him immediately any paper they had received or they had sent, he would just tell her “Judy please, find me the letter about the last fertilizer distribution” and she was supposed to know which file it was in and bring the file open at the right place.

She learned that this boss was like all the bosses, he would look as if he was very kind and then he would get very angry because she had not entered an outgoing letter in the ledger, even when it was the boss who had taken the letter himself out of the office without showing it to her;

He was like all the bosses, but he was white and even more difficult to understand; he would never lock the Office and he would call her in and ask her to take the driver and go to town and try and find someplace where to buy notebooks and pens for next training course. Then he would give her money and she was supposed to keep an account book and when she came back from the shopping, she was not expected to hand back what was left of the money but to keep it in a box he called the ”petty cash box”. Of course the other girls learned about it and when they had no money, which was all the time, they would come to Judy and ask to borrow from the petty cash box and she had to say no and they would not understand;

Judy was taught how to use the computer. It was as she thought, it was not difficult at all, she could not understand why they were making such a fuss about it. She would tell the other girls how difficult it was and how, if they made any error, the whole computer could brake down and they would have to pay more than ten thousand dollars. When her white boss was teaching her how to use the computer, sometime he would lean over her, and his skin would touch her skin, she had never felt a white skin before, and she did not know whether he was doing it because she was a woman or if he did not know that this was not proper. Maybe he did not like her because she was black and has such a short nose and maybe like other bosses, he was making jokes about her?

It was so difficult to understand a white man, he would have sometimes plenty of beer in his home and yet he did never smell of beer.

Sometimes, when they had time, they would all have lunch in his home, she watched carefully to see how they did it, they never used their hands to eat, but they were strange white people, they would eat mealy meal n'shima like a Zambian even if they did not know that their cook did not do it the right way.

Judy was now confident, six months had passed, she was confirmed in her job, her pay check was issued by the FAO of the United Nations, with a six months experience she was taking in twice what her elder sister was getting as a Senor Clerk and nearly as much as the Director of Agriculture.

She was getting used to her white man boss. She had accepted that these people had other ways, that they made mistakes and did not even know that they had made a serious mistake. These people from abroad would never understand who you could look at and how you could look at somebody, they were disrespectful and they did not even know about it. They also spoke at the wrong time and said things to the wrong people. They would never understand about tribes and they would gather in the same room people who should never together.

The first time her boss told her he was going away for a one week mission and that she would be in charge of the Office for that time, she felt a bit anxious. People would come, they would ask for the boss, she would tell them that she was in charge and would they like to leave a message, they would sit down and write the message. They would ask Judy how it was to work there, if she knew how they could also get a job with that project, she would find out where they were coming from, what family they belonged to. Day by day she was becoming an important person, some of the visitors did not really come to see her boss, they preferred to deal directly with Judy because they knew she would not forget immediately what they were asking for.

She made sure that they understood that she was not a typist but an assistant; When the drivers were idle she would go out in the parking place and ask whether the cars had been washed that day or she would send them on errands, giving them just the right amount of money they needed and making sure she got the right amount of change when they came back.

Her boss invited his Zambian Chief and Judy to a lunch, together with her mother. Judy was so ashamed of the mother who was speaking all the time, as if she did not understand that she had to show the same respect to a white man as she would have shown to a Zambian man. Her mother was all the time asking questions, as if she was no longer a Zambian woman and did not remember that you do not ask questions.

After a year they moved the Office to the Ministry of Agriculture. They were near the Centre of Lusaka, it was good for her, she was near her sister, within a month she knew most of the girls working in the Department.

The Office was much much bigger and just in front of the Office of the Director of Agriculture.

Her boss was getting away from the Office more and more often to travel to seminars and visits to the farmers and everybody seemed to get used to the fact that she was running the Office.

Judy was the only one in the Ministry who knew how to use a computer and after the boss had had a training course with the girls from the typing pool, they would come to Judy and say that they had understood nothing but were afraid to say so to a white man and they asked her to show them how to do it.