Children who look like mine

I teach primary school in Freetown and I am entirely serious about this project. My students are seven and eight years old and they read what I put in front of them with complete attention and complete honesty. If it's wrong they look disappointed and that is one of the clearer forms of criticism I've encountered. The stories I write feature children in Sierra Leone in recognisable situations: school, the market, the compound, the kind of afternoon when adults are busy and children make their own decisions. I don't write about poverty as spectacle. I don't write about the war for children who are too young to know that it happened. I write about the ordinary difficulties and pleasures of being seven in Freetown in 2024. I grew up in Kenema and came to Freetown for teacher training and stayed. I've been teaching for five years. The writing started because my class kept asking me to tell stories at the end of Friday afternoons, and the ones I invented were better than the ones in the reading scheme, and a colleague told me to write them down. I have four finished stories. I think they're good. I want my students to read themselves on a page. That's the whole reason.