Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith

whole world is changing. There are new people everywhere. New buildings. And all this rush—everybody is in ahurry. And you sit there and think: Why is everybody in a hurry? That will not make the crops grow any quicker, will it? It will not.
    “Thamaga is a good place, and I was very happy there. I went to school and I was good at the things that they taught us. I can write, Mma. I can read too. I am not an illiterate. I have a Bible in the bedroom that I know a lot of by heart. I have read it many times. I can say much of it without reading. ‘In the beginning …’”
    Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Yes, I have heard that.” And added, quickly, “Tell me what happened to you, Mma. Out in Thamaga. What happened?”
    The old woman looked at her in surprise. Her eyes, Mma Ramotswe noticed, were unusually moist round the edges, as are the eyes of one who has looked too long into the smoke of a wood fire, smarting. “Nothing happened to me in Thamaga, Mma. Nothing.”
    Mma Ramotswe smiled. “In all those years, Mma?”
    The old woman's face creased with amusement. “I suppose that things happened. It's just that when you are living in a village, it seems at the time that there is nothing happening. You know how it is. There is the hot season. Then there are the rains. Then it gets cold. And then the hot weather starts again.
    “And children are born,” she went on, “and they grow up and go away and more children are born. That is what happens in a place like Thamaga.”
    Mma Ramotswe knew what she meant. It had been the same in Mochudi when she was a girl. Something had happened in her life because she had come to Gaborone and started the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but there were those who had stayed. Nothing much had happened in their lives, and yet were they unhappier for that? She did not think so.
    “I was married when I was sixteen,” said the old woman. “I did not really want to get married because I would have liked to havebeen a nurse, or an assistant to a nurse. They took girls at the Scottish hospital in Molepolole, the Livingstone Hospital. You know the place, Mma?”
    “I know it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Dr. Merriweather's hospital. When he was there. He is late now, but people still love him. Late people are still loved, aren't they, Mma?”
    “Yes, they are. You are right. And that is the place. I could have gone there and they would have trained me, but my senior uncle was against it. He said that if I became a nurse I would go and work in South Africa and never come back, and then who would look after him and the others? So they made me marry. I think that they were interested in the cattle they would get for me too. In the
lobola
.
    “There was a young man who was the nephew of a friend of my senior uncle—my own father was late, you see. So they introduced us—they brought this young man to the house and they sat and watched as we talked. The young man was very shy and he could not talk about anything. He looked at me as if he was trying to say,
Sorry, this is not my idea
. When he looked at me in that way, I knew that I would be able to love him. I did not like men who never thought about how a woman was feeling. This one was thinking of me. So I said to my senior uncle that he had found a very good young man and that I would behave as a good wife should and he should not worry that they would ask for their cattle back. That is what my uncle was really worried about, Mma.
    “We were married and then almost straightaway my husband went off and got a job in Gaborone as a government driver. They were looking for drivers then, as the Government had just found diamonds and they had money to spend on cars. They bought many cars with the diamond money and they needed men to drive them.
    “He was very popular with the government people, and theymade him a Driver Class One. This meant that he could drive big government cars and not just the cars of small officials. Now and then he drove Seretse