• 

Naana checked the taskbar of her laptop. It was 3:45pm. Almost time for her to wrap up her zoom session with her 6th grade class.

“Okay so listen up everyone, your weekend assignments are as follows; I want you to write a poem using the phrase – “Finders, keepers”. We learnt the meaning of this phrase in our english lesson early on this week.
And for the upcoming memorial holiday formerly known as founder’s day ; I would also like you to write why it’s an important holiday in the history of our country. All assignments should be submitted via email by monday 5pm prompt.
“Did everyone get that?”
“Yes! Auntie Naana, most of the 6th graders responded.

“Thomas! Wake up Thomas. The class is over”.
He was fast asleep behind his monitor screen. She couldn’t really blame him. Even before online sessions, the 11 year old had a very short attention span and had always struggled to stay awake in class. The online lessons were not further helping his situation.

“Thomas, did you write down the assignment I just gave out?”

“Oh Madam Auntie Naana,” Thomas responded. The rest of the class burst into laughter.

“Could you guys please keep quiet so that I can hear him?”

“Thomas, did you hear me? Did you write out the assignment I gave out? What did I say? Read out two key things I said ” Naana asked Thomas again.

Thomas quite flushed, quickly tried to recall if he had really heard anything she said. He had been gone for quite a while and was proud of himself for not getting caught before the lesson ended this time round.

“Yes Madam Auntie Naana. Please I wrote it”.

This is what he had managed to scribble quickly in his book –
a poem about phrase; keep us. Poem about founders- this is all he had written! He told himself he would figure the rest of it later.

“Ah-huh, go ahead what did I say?”

“You said something about writing a poem and founder’s day”, he added.

“Okay then”, Naana said. Fully convinced that maybe he had really been listening afterall. This is the closest he had gotten to saying the right things anytime she caught him dozing off during lessons. Besides, she was too tired to pry any further.
“Okay the class is over. Have a nice weekend”.

“Thank you Auntie Naana!”
“Bye Auntie Naana!” The children excitedly said as they quickly logged out of the online session.
“That was fast”. she said smiling to herself.

She wasn’t suprised about their excitement. It was going to be a long weekend. With no screaming over the phone due to poor network or constantly having to repeat the same sentence over a million times when one of them decides to stop daydreaming and say, please I didn’t hear you. Having classes online were exhausting for her as well. So she was also pretty excited to be off the hook for at least a few days.

Fast forward, the weekend ended as quickly as it came. Begrudgingly, Naana dragged herself out of bed as she had just woken up from her afternoon nap. She had to mark her assignments before the next session with her class the next morning.
She opened her laptop and saw 30 email notifications. She checked the time, it was 4:54pm.
She figured that would mean all 25 students submitted their assignments and 5 malicious spam emails from only God knows where.
She proceeded to scroll through to be sure everyone had submitted.
“Mmm okay, that’s good” she said as she checked each name and subject of each person’s email. Everyone simply wrote out the phrase as the subject of the mail. Properly, just as she had thought them on their first ever mail submission of Poems.
She continued scrolling through. Then she stopped over one person’s work- the subject of the email got her confused.
She raised her eye brows, “so which of them did this?” She said slighty amused, as she proceeded to open the mail to check the subject and content of the mail.

From; thomasAsiedu11@gmail.com
To; naanacofie1987@gmail.com
Subject; FOUNDERS KEEP US

FOUNDERS-KEEP-US Maybe if we would ask the people of old,
Then we would truly understand.
Maybe it’s not their fault we are this behind.
Then we would try and put these things in mind;
Maybe the people of old were not told the truth.
Maybe when the masters of gold came with their high sailing ships and mind changing whips.
The people of old did not really have a choice.
Perhaps in the beginning their true motives were distorted.
Perhaps they wouldn’t have exchanged their precious gold for day lasting butter.
Maybe when the masters of gold got off their high and mighty horses. They were only here to find new places. Only to go down in history as those who “found”. They sure did like alot of adventure and treasure hunting.
So the people of old in their bid to also find adventure decided,
Maybe we should find something to keep us at par with these foreigners.

Something that would keep us like them. And maybe they wouldn’t see us as less. And they would let us ride and sail with them.
So they decided their gold wasn’t enough.
They wanted more. But how would they put it?
So here we are now. All because they said
Founders keep us
Maybe, they only meant to say founders feed us.
But here we are, many years on. Because the people of old used the phrase;
“Founders keep us”.

Still staring at her screen, stifling a laugh and awe at the same time. He obviously heard nothing that day. She had to give him the credit, he was just 11 and he really did figure something out afterall. He had mistakenly managed to paint quite a beautiful picture about colonisation in the most innocent way.
Still laughing, she placed her hand on her temples in amusement and said,
“Oh Thomas, I said to use the phrase- “Finders Keepers”

Happy Memorial / formerly Founders’ Day!

• 

PS: “finders keepers” is a phrase that is used to assert that whoever finds something by chance is entitled to keep it.

Informal phrase: google.