The wicked witch?

It’s mid November. School holidays start this week. Soon I will need to start taking some of “my children” out shopping for next year’s schooling needs.

Which means I will also need to get hold of all the clients whose children are under our sponsorship programme. I need to get the yearly reports done to be sent out to the respective sponsors, and to ask for next year’s sponsorship money.

Rosnah, without even me asking, SMSed me to inform me that her daughter obtained 3A’s 2B’s for her UPSR. After getting that SMS, I remembered Sofie and Fuzi too had children sitting for UPSR this year. So I sent them both text messages to ask for their results.

Sofie replied later at night. Her son, Saiful (the one with those very thick glasses), got a mixture of ABCD’s in his UPSR. Fuzi has yet to reply my SMS. I wonder how her son fared. The boy, Faiz, had always been giving his mother problems… always befriending the wrong group of friends, and always landing in trouble. However, the last time I went to visit, Fuzi told me that Faiz had been a lot more tolerable of late. He has stopped befriending the group of friends that had always landed him in trouble. Fuzi at one time had almost given up on him and she finally threatened him, “Nanti mama suruh makcik Afizah hantar kamu pergi rumah anak yatim!”

Which reminds me, Sofie too, sometimes when she got fed up with her children’s stubbornness, she’d say, “Nanti mama bagitau makcik Afizah baru engkorang tau!”

In fact Sofie herself, who now stays together with her sister who moved from up north to stay with her and the children, would sometimes get the same “threat” from her sister. Being still rather weak to do heavy work, sometimes when she feels just slightly better, Sofie would try to do more work to earn more income for the family. Her sister would always advise her not to exert herself, and when she finds Sofie being stubborn, she’d say, “Nanti akak bagitau Kak Afizah!”

Not forgetting Mrs K, who despite always trying to borrow from me (without success), whenever she has some other problem and was told to talk to me about it, would respond with, “Tak beranilah. Kak Afizah tu garang.”

(Funny thing is, after that they would all tell me about it… that’s how I got to know!)

And there’s Shila, who, whenever she sends me a text message to tell me that she had to cancel joining us for any of our activities, and I was too busy to reply immediately, would come up with a follow up message, “Akak marah ke?”

Hmmm…. how come I sound like a wicked witch? Ooh… I am one?

*Pic taken from photobucket.com