“These girls are chopping vegetables,” said Mr Bobologo solemnly. “And there is stew for our meal tonight.”

“So I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I see, too, that they have just made tea.”

“It is better for them to drink tea than strong liquor,” intoned Mr Bobologo, looking disapprovingly at one of the girls, who cast her eyes downwards, in shame.

“Those are my views too,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Tea refreshes. It clears the mind. Tea is good at any time of the day, but especially at mid-day, when it is so hot.” She paused, and then added, “As it is today.”

“You are right, Mma,” said Mr Bobologo. “I am a great drinker of tea. I cannot understand why anybody would want to drink anything else when there is tea to be had. I have never been able to understand that.”

Mma Ramotswe now used an expression which is common in Setswana and which indicates understanding, and firm endorsement of what another has said. “Eee, Rra,” she said, with great depth of feeling, drawing out the vowels. If anything could convey to this man that she needed a cup of tea, this would. But it did not.

“This habit of drinking coffee is a very bad thing,” went on Mr Bobologo. “Tea is better for the heart than coffee is. People who drink coffee strain their hearts. Tea has a calming effect on the heart. It makes the heart go more slowly. Thump, thump. That is what the heart should sound like. I have always said that.”

“Yes,” agreed Mma Ramotswe, weakly. “That is very true.”

“That is why I am in favour of tea,” pronounced Mr Bobologo with an air of finality, as might a speaker at a kgotla meeting make his concluding statement.

They stood there in silence. Mr Bobologo looked at the girls, who were still chopping vegetables with an air of studied concentration. Mma Ramotswe looked at the cup of tea. And the girls looked at the vegetables.

AFTER THEY had finished inspecting the kitchen-which was very clean, Mma Ramotswe noticed-they went out and sat on the verandah. There was still no tea, and when Mma Ramotswe, in a last desperate bid, mentioned that she was thirsty, a glass of water was called for. She sipped on this in a resigned way, imagining that it was bush tea, which helped slightly, but not a great deal.

“Now that you have seen the House of Hope,” said Mr Bobologo, “you can ask me anything you like about it. Or you can tell me what you think. I don’t mind. We have nothing to hide in the House of Hope.”

Mma Ramotswe lifted her glass to her lips, noticing the greasy fingerprints around its rim, the fingerprints of those girls in the kitchen, she imagined. But this did not concern her. We all have fingerprints, after all.

“I think that this is a very good place,” she began. “You are doing very good work.”

“Yes, I am,” said Mr Bobologo.

Mma Ramotswe looked out at the garden, at the rows of beans. A large black dung beetle was optimistically rolling a tiny trophy, a fragment of manure from the vegetable beds, back towards its home somewhere-a small bit of nature struggling with another small bit of nature, but as important as anything else in the world.

She turned to Mr Bobologo. “I was wondering, Rra,” she began. “I was wondering why the girls come here. And why do they stay, if they want to be bar girls in the first place?”

Mr Bobologo nodded. This was clearly the obvious question to ask. “Some of them are very young and are sent here by the social work department or the police when they see them going into bars. Those girls have to stay, or the police will take them back to their village.

“Then there are the other bad girls, the ones our people meet down at the bus station or outside the bars. They may have nowhere to stay. They may be hungry. They may have been beaten up by some man. They are ready to come here then.”

Mma Ramotswe listened carefully. The House of Hope might be a rather dispiriting place, but it was better than the alternative.

“This is very interesting. Most of us are doing nothing about these things. You are doing something. That is very good.” She paused. “But how did you come to do this work, Rra? Why do you give up all your time to this thing? You are a busy teacher, and you have much to do at the school. Instead, you very kindly come and give up all your time to this House of Hope.”

Mr Bobologo thought for a moment. Mma Ramotswe noticed that his hands were clasped together; her question had unsettled him.

“I will tell you something, Mma,” he said after a few moments. “I would not like you to speak about it, please. Will you give me your word that you will not speak about it?”

Instinctively Mma Ramotswe nodded, immediately realising that this would put her in difficulty if he said something that she needed to report to her client. But she had agreed to keep his secret, and she would honour that.

Mr Bobologo spoke quietly. “Something happened to me, Mma. Something happened some years ago, and I have not forgotten this thing. I had a daughter, you see, by my wife who is late. She was our first born, and our only child. I was very proud of her, as only a father can be proud. She was clever and did well at Gaborone Secondary School.

“Then one day she came back from school, and she was a different girl. Just like that. She paid no attention to me and she started to go out at night. I tried to keep her in and she would scream at me and stamp her feet. I did not know what to do. I could not raise a hand to her, as there was no mother, and a father does not strike a motherless child. I tried to reason with her, and she just said that I was an old man and I did not understand the things that she now understood.

“And then she left. She was just sixteen when this happened. She left, and I looked everywhere and asked everybody about her. Until one day I heard that she had been seen over the border, down in Mafikeng, and that this place where she had been seen, this place…” He faltered, and Mma Ramotswe reached out to him, in a gesture of sympathy and reassurance.

“You can carry on when you are ready, Rra,” she said. But she already knew what he was going to say and he need not have continued.

“This place was a bar down there. I went there and my heart was hammering within me. I could not believe that my daughter would be in such a place. But she was, and she did not want to talk to me. I cried out to her and a man with a broken nose, a young man in a smart suit, a tsotsi type, came and threatened me. He said,Go home, uncle. Your daughter is not your property. Go home, or pay for one of these girls, like everybody else. Those were his words, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe was silent. Her hand was on his shoulder, and it remained there.

Mr Bobologo raised his head and looked up into the sky, high above the shade netting. “And so I said to myself that I would work to help these girls, because there are other fathers, just like me, who have this awful thing happen to them. These men are my brothers, Mma. I hope that you understand that.”

Mma Ramotswe swallowed. “I understand very well,” she said. “I understand. Your heart is broken, Rra. I understand that.”

“It is broken inside me,” echoed Mr Bobologo. “You are right about that, Mma.”

There was not much else to be said, and they made their way down the path to Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van, parked under a tree. But as they walked, Mma Ramotswe decided to ask another question, more by way of making conversation than to elicit information.

“What are your plans for the House of Hope, Rra?”

Mr Bobologo turned and looked back at the house. “We are going to build an extension there at the side,” he said. “We shall have new showers and a room where the girls can learn sewing. That is what we are going to do.”

“That will be expensive,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Extensions always seem to cost more than the house itself. These builders are greedy men.”