Mrs. Mwaka was already seated at an outside table when Asha reached the café near the east gate. She did not look like the figure Asha’s anger had constructed in her head. She had short hair threaded with gray, glasses low on her nose, and an oversized handbag stuffed with papers. When she stood to greet Asha, her hands trembled slightly.
“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Mwaka said. “And thank you for not putting my name on social media.”
“I thought about it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No. But if I were you, I would have thought about it too.”
Asha did not begin with accusations. She placed a sheet of paper on the table listing categories rather than names: attendance, grades, bursary status, club activity, emergency contact.
“Did these categories enter your spreadsheet?”
“Some of them.”
“Why?”
“We started with notices. Parents then asked how to know whether their children were settling in. Someone said attendance was an early warning. Someone else said bursary trouble can push a student out of school. Each new column looked useful on its own.”
“Until it became a dossier.”
Mrs. Mwaka winced at the word. “I did not call it that.”
“But that is what it became.”
“Yes.”
The direct answer took some of the force out of the speech Asha had prepared.
“Do you know my absence reached my mother before my own portal updated?”
“No. I did not know the timing.”
“Who sent it?”
“I will not name someone before I verify it.”
Asha leaned back. “That is the same cautious answer the university gave me.”
“And now you understand why it is sometimes the right answer.”
Asha had to concede the point.
Mrs. Mwaka opened her handbag but did not take anything out yet. “Do you want to know why I started the group?”
“Yes.”
“My son, Baraka, was a first-year student here last year. The first month he called us every Sunday. The second month he was ‘busy.’ The third month he stopped answering.”
Her voice changed.
“He had begun missing class. He had failed two assessments. He was behind on hostel payments. He was ashamed, and every day he delayed telling us made the next day harder. We learned what was happening when the situation was already serious.”
“Did he leave university?”
“He paused the year. He is home now, working and in therapy. He will return if and when he wants.”
Asha understood the next sentence before Mrs. Mwaka spoke it.
“I kept thinking, if I had seen one signal early enough, maybe I would have asked the right question.”
“And you turned every other student’s life into a warning system for what happened to your son.”
The sentence came out harder than Asha intended.
Mrs. Mwaka flinched, then looked at her steadily. “That is true. But do not use his pain as an insult. I was trying to build something out of what I believed was my failure.”
Asha swallowed. “I am sorry for how I said it. I am not sorry about the boundary.”
“I understand.”
They went through the categories one by one. Mrs. Mwaka agreed that grades and individual attendance should never have been collected without permission. She defended general bursary reminders. Asha agreed that general reminders were not the problem; individual status was. The conversation became easier once they named the data rather than arguing about “parents” as one category.
Mrs. Mwaka admitted there had never been a moment when the group sat down and decided to build a database. It emerged from requests. A public event notice here. A student volunteer helping with bursary reminders there. A parent asking whether a child had been attending lectures. Information that was temporary in one context became a permanent cell in another.
“You had no consent process?” Asha asked.
“No.”
“No retention rule?”
“No.”
“No rule about who could add fields?”
“No.”
“Then freeze it. No new columns, no new personal entries until students and the university decide what the boundary should be.”
Mrs. Mwaka thought for a moment, then nodded. “I can freeze additions.”
That mattered. It was not deletion yet, but it stopped the system from growing while they argued about what came next.
Finally Mrs. Mwaka pulled a printed sheet from her bag. Most names had been blacked out with marker. The heading read **Helpers / Contacts / Parent Leads**. The categories included club notice volunteer, bursary reminder student, class-summary helper, parent coordinator.
“I will not give you the names,” she said. “Most of these students believed they were doing favors.”
“I do not want to expose them. I want to understand the flow.”
Mrs. Mwaka looked surprised. “Then we may be able to work on this.”
“Working on it does not mean the spreadsheet stays.”
“I know.”
As she slid the sheet back into her bag, Asha caught the handwritten filename beneath the printed page.
**Helper Spreadsheet — latest.**
Mrs. Mwaka had a list of “helpers.”