When My Bubble Got Busted
Today I may not be having the right mood of story telling but it is at this point that I always challenge myself to raise up to the occasion and do something that will distract my otherwise crappy mood and turn it into something constructive like giving you something to read about, au sio?
Moving on swiftly to the main issue here, I was a very aggressive, playful and cheeky gal (don't want to use naughty to describe my character coz am sure what that may interpret in all of your minds, am not insinuating anything, honest). My excessively carefree nature is one of the major reasons why my folks decided that I may not grow up to become a proper woman if I didnt have enough exposure to socialize with girls my own age. Apparently, my siblings were all boys and when it came to playing, i would join in their boyish games no matter how nasty the games were. I would become too rough even with my brothers and they would always tell on me to my parents so that is when my parents decided "ciaigana ni ciaigana" (enough is enough).
Let me try to paint a picture of what I used to be up to that was a NO NO to my folks. Any time I arrived home from school I would opt to go directly to a tree outside the compound, climb it and start chokozaing people from up there as they pass by since the main road was very close to our home. Note that I was supposed to be doing my homework and helping in some house chores. That particular tree was very accommodating to a point where I would sometimes doze off on one of them branches and only wake up when the birds made too much noise trying to look for a place to sleep as the darkness has already fallen. It is also the same tree where a branch I thought was stable enough to carry my weight broke and I fell all the way to the ground with a few pauses on the way that would last a second when the branch would get caught between other branches but would slip out due to my weight. Aside a few scratches on my legs and my butt having a constant dull ache due to the impact, I was lucky to be alive. That was the last time I ever climbed that tree.
Now, the day came when I was to be taken to a boarding school. It was the talk of the village as back in the day boarding schools were like going abroad. My little friends would tell me how lucky I was as I would get to mix with white children, how I will eat buttered bread for breakfast, chapatis and meat every day (note, the most common meals then were ngwaci and nduma for breakfast, githeri and if you got lucky, rice mixed with overcooked cabbages and potatoes for lunch and supper, kwanza potatoes were a must in any food that was ever cooked) and how I will get to wear shoes all the time. I felt the luckiest girl and thought how privileged and loved I was. The feeling died when I arrived at the "promised heaven".
For starters, the school was situated in a very remote area where if you did not have your own ride, you would walk like 3km from where the matatu would make a turn-around. Apparently we were the pioneers of the school so that made the school very quiet and deserted from having just one class of about 30 pupils. The dormitory was something else all together, a big hall with very few beds and a lot of echoing when you talked however softly. Every time I entered the dorm, I felt like Noah inside the whale's stomach. Being a new school, the only place that had electricity was the dorm. Classes and the dinning hall remained in darkness at night which meant we had to eat real early and no preps. Most of our homework would be done in the dorm on the top bunk of a double decker bed. My first meal was rice that almost looked like half cooked ugali and ndengu that almost made me toothless as they had a lot of pebbles that I kept crushing in every bite. I wondered whether they were part of seasoning the food. Then of course I wondered where the white kids were and why the place did not have all the stuff my friends back in the village talked about.
My parents had to leave and that is when I really panicked as I came to the realization that this was by far not the place I had dreamt about. I started thinking maybe I was an unbearable child to them and they had finally gotten the chance to get rid of me. After they left, I cried like my heart was being pulled out of my chest but later realized no one was sympathising with me. I had to pull myself together and decided this will end soon after my parents got to know about the conditions of the school. Another shocker is when we were summoned in the dorm and told to get into our night dresses, carry our dirty clothes to the laundry area so that the Matron could show us how to wash our own clothes.
Come morning, we were required to fetch bathing water from the taps near the laundry area and that meant the water had dropped a few degrees during the night so your young body had to adjust to the stabbing effect the chilling water provided. The breakfast comprised of uji made from maize flour that had been hurriedly cooked, the result being a lot of big lumps in it that sometimes refused to go through your narrow throat. I seriously doubted I was in a boarding school and was so sure my parents had brought me to an approved school just to punish me for my overly spirited nature.
That is the first encounter I had with the school I had felt so privileged to join. The first month was the hardest for me as I would also find it very hard to make new friends because I missed my friends back in the village. I missed by parents and brothers even more and I would cry a lot when I thought about them, about my warm bed, about the food my mum would cook for us, the TV programmes I couldnt watch anymore and the hilarious stories my dad would tell us when he came home from work especially if he had consumed two or three.
Next, I will tell you about how I finally got to make friends, the teachers' unforgivable behaviour towards us and how one particular girl managed to became our goddess, no kidding.
Live life like there is no tomorrow by appreciating every moment u got.
Jenwaki
Moving on swiftly to the main issue here, I was a very aggressive, playful and cheeky gal (don't want to use naughty to describe my character coz am sure what that may interpret in all of your minds, am not insinuating anything, honest). My excessively carefree nature is one of the major reasons why my folks decided that I may not grow up to become a proper woman if I didnt have enough exposure to socialize with girls my own age. Apparently, my siblings were all boys and when it came to playing, i would join in their boyish games no matter how nasty the games were. I would become too rough even with my brothers and they would always tell on me to my parents so that is when my parents decided "ciaigana ni ciaigana" (enough is enough).
Let me try to paint a picture of what I used to be up to that was a NO NO to my folks. Any time I arrived home from school I would opt to go directly to a tree outside the compound, climb it and start chokozaing people from up there as they pass by since the main road was very close to our home. Note that I was supposed to be doing my homework and helping in some house chores. That particular tree was very accommodating to a point where I would sometimes doze off on one of them branches and only wake up when the birds made too much noise trying to look for a place to sleep as the darkness has already fallen. It is also the same tree where a branch I thought was stable enough to carry my weight broke and I fell all the way to the ground with a few pauses on the way that would last a second when the branch would get caught between other branches but would slip out due to my weight. Aside a few scratches on my legs and my butt having a constant dull ache due to the impact, I was lucky to be alive. That was the last time I ever climbed that tree.
Now, the day came when I was to be taken to a boarding school. It was the talk of the village as back in the day boarding schools were like going abroad. My little friends would tell me how lucky I was as I would get to mix with white children, how I will eat buttered bread for breakfast, chapatis and meat every day (note, the most common meals then were ngwaci and nduma for breakfast, githeri and if you got lucky, rice mixed with overcooked cabbages and potatoes for lunch and supper, kwanza potatoes were a must in any food that was ever cooked) and how I will get to wear shoes all the time. I felt the luckiest girl and thought how privileged and loved I was. The feeling died when I arrived at the "promised heaven".
For starters, the school was situated in a very remote area where if you did not have your own ride, you would walk like 3km from where the matatu would make a turn-around. Apparently we were the pioneers of the school so that made the school very quiet and deserted from having just one class of about 30 pupils. The dormitory was something else all together, a big hall with very few beds and a lot of echoing when you talked however softly. Every time I entered the dorm, I felt like Noah inside the whale's stomach. Being a new school, the only place that had electricity was the dorm. Classes and the dinning hall remained in darkness at night which meant we had to eat real early and no preps. Most of our homework would be done in the dorm on the top bunk of a double decker bed. My first meal was rice that almost looked like half cooked ugali and ndengu that almost made me toothless as they had a lot of pebbles that I kept crushing in every bite. I wondered whether they were part of seasoning the food. Then of course I wondered where the white kids were and why the place did not have all the stuff my friends back in the village talked about.
My parents had to leave and that is when I really panicked as I came to the realization that this was by far not the place I had dreamt about. I started thinking maybe I was an unbearable child to them and they had finally gotten the chance to get rid of me. After they left, I cried like my heart was being pulled out of my chest but later realized no one was sympathising with me. I had to pull myself together and decided this will end soon after my parents got to know about the conditions of the school. Another shocker is when we were summoned in the dorm and told to get into our night dresses, carry our dirty clothes to the laundry area so that the Matron could show us how to wash our own clothes.
Come morning, we were required to fetch bathing water from the taps near the laundry area and that meant the water had dropped a few degrees during the night so your young body had to adjust to the stabbing effect the chilling water provided. The breakfast comprised of uji made from maize flour that had been hurriedly cooked, the result being a lot of big lumps in it that sometimes refused to go through your narrow throat. I seriously doubted I was in a boarding school and was so sure my parents had brought me to an approved school just to punish me for my overly spirited nature.
That is the first encounter I had with the school I had felt so privileged to join. The first month was the hardest for me as I would also find it very hard to make new friends because I missed my friends back in the village. I missed by parents and brothers even more and I would cry a lot when I thought about them, about my warm bed, about the food my mum would cook for us, the TV programmes I couldnt watch anymore and the hilarious stories my dad would tell us when he came home from work especially if he had consumed two or three.
Next, I will tell you about how I finally got to make friends, the teachers' unforgivable behaviour towards us and how one particular girl managed to became our goddess, no kidding.
Live life like there is no tomorrow by appreciating every moment u got.
Jenwaki
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