This week in Kampala and the surrounding towns and all around East Africa,
especially in the urbanized areas, many children aged five (or even
as young as four) to eighteen years are going back to boarding schools (BS) . As i see the many cars driving by, taxis, buses; all full of children and parents, laden with blue and green tin cases, mattresses and blankets, causing some of the worst traffic jam periods in Kampala six times a year, I recall my own BS days. As you may have guessed by now BS is one of my pet dislikes.
It is thirty years down the road
and i can still recall the empty fear and desolation that would grip my heart as I packed my tin case; packing the little piece of
Lux soap in this corner; some
times i would ask for
Cadam or
Sunlight which was bright and yellow and smelt
like antiseptic;
Vaseline .."but Maama they asked us for two tins and you only bought one"...in another corner.
There would be my glass bottle of
TreeTop orange juice and two packets of
Family biscuits by Manji factory. Did Manji in Kenya factory know many children in Uganda would long for their plain biscuits and chew off the little round corners one by one to make the biscuit last forever? So far away from home?
The competition for me and my friends was always between
Marie and
Family.
We would argue over which one was better for long minutes. On rare occasions when some excited trader went to Kenya; we would get the chocolate covered Manji thin biscuits. These rarities became rarer gold the older we grew, in fact by the time I was in my fifth year at the school; the chocolate biscuits were the stuff of legends we used to tell each other when recalling better times. Uganda was groaning under the economic war of Idi Amin Dada and chocolate biscuit factories were not on our priority list. The
faithful tin of roasted groundnuts in an empty tin of formula milk would complete the back-to-school must-have set.
"Maama, please dont forget to buy me sugar" and...
"Please buy for me the type of
powdered milk called SMA it is nice"
I would say.
My Mum would reply
" SMA is for
babies".
I would say
"Betty came to school with a tin of SMA to lick at school, you mix it with sugar and it is very nice"
My mum would thereafter comply with my demand for formula milk or buy me something similar.
She would buy baby formula for an eight year old, maybe in an effort to comfort me, I dont know.
All i know is that i loved powdered milk with sugar mixed with roasted groundnuts. It was to myself, a great comfort , right up to the end of my boarding school years.
Still this pacification did not work. If it did, the comfort was very short lived on the very day of going back to school. All the nice food they
would make for me on that day, I would just pick at it.
Show me one eight year old who
eats all the nice junk food you may buy for them on the day they are going back to
boarding school and I will show you a horned crested crane.
Finally at around 2pm, the car comes that is to carry us off to the
school. We pack our tin cases with hearts full of unease and dread in the car trunk, the mattresses are rolled tight with blanket inside. We
wave goodbye to aunty and our baby sister and set off.
As we drive past familiar towns on the way to the boarding school; Mengo, Nateete,
Kyengera… a feeling of emptiness sits alongside the dread. All in the car are silent except for
a comment or two from my mother. I dont remember having any conversation
in that car on the way to school with anyone; be it my two-years-younger
brother (we went to the same school) or my mother. Once in a while, my father or mother
would come up with
" You must study
hard" to which I would answer " Yes".
or "Did you pack everything?"
" Yes I did ".
As the gates of the school came up, I could come up
with
“ Don’t forget to come see us on visiting day”.
:We wont".
Many times though, they did forget.
Not much talk among us all or between my brother and I. Somewhere in the middle of the holiday he had told us hilarious stories of the things that went on in the boys dorm and of fantastic
escapades that children; both boys and girls made to get an extra plate of food. Of girls stealing cabbage heads from the school garden and covering up the leaves, but on the way
back, it would all be silence between us.
In fact i talked (really
talked) to my brother only much later in life.
At school he and I would barely
say hallo when we met near the classroom blocks.
A friend nudges me and
asks my six year old brother... " Amma, Are you really her brother?"
To which he would
reply " I am ".
Then the friend nudges me again; " Why dont you greet
him?"
Then I would quickly ask how he was.
I wanted to have something to give him but I would have nothing to give (I had eaten all my grub within the first two weeks and was at the complete
mercy of the Dining room and the prefect who served the food at table). I would then say to my brother, something like
"Your shoes are
torn" or
To which he often
said
"Yes".
End of sister to brother dialogue.
I walk away with
my poky little friend and we go off to play or walk the compound till the
supper bell rings.
My brother walks off too. I dont know what he is thinking. I liked my little brother but i guess we had not had a
chance to learn to talk to each other, so we could not talk for long.
I went away to school from home when i
was five, when he was learning to talk and by the time he was fully
verbal, both of us were being dropped off for long periods in a boarding school, sleeping in
different long houses at opposite ends of the school compound. Our
schedules, classes and activities at the school did not facilitate brother to
sister talk or make room for families in any special way.
We were too young to
even think it mattered.
There were were; family; trying-to-care-family.
Family but strangers to
each other, living among strangers.
As children return to boarding school this season, let us know what you think about this whole not so simple issue.
Until then,
I remain,
trulyhateboardingschool @blogspot.com
