Boarding Schools - Kenyan Style...
Cold showers, frost bite and daily dinners of maize and weevil-infested beans are the memories that make me shudder when I recall boarding school while in high school
Its not so much that I simply feel nauseous when I recall my domestic science teacher …she had a perpetual sneer and I remember her pasty vanishing cream on her face like a circle round the face and red lipstick bottom lip only (she had a unique foul sense of fashion). I remember her prancing around looking at our stitches and cooking with disdain.
I still have night mares about her.
Well, truth be told, there were truly precious moments in high school. I remember our cook Maina. He was a sunny man with an impish smile and never gave more than three pieces of meat On Monday and Friday lunch…not a piece less or more..matter how enticing..err or not you were. That was the rule, three bits of dodgy meat a piece… it was the highlight our dreary days in school. And who could forget sausage on Sunday, to this day I have no idea what kind of sausage they were but we savored each morsel like it was a million dollar meal.
These days I tend to look back a lot with all this nostalgia..perhaps am getting old and mushy. But I sometimes find myself laughing out loud when I remember our matron who we called "sixie" cos she had six fingers on each hand. She used to prance stealthily like a cat around the corridors busting us in all kinds of horrible situations. She would twirl her keys on her extra pinky (this by the way terrified us) and her eyes bulged out in anger and her voice bellowed like thunder, "WHERE ARE YOU GOING AFTER LIGHTS OUT!" Most of the times she was harmless her bark was pretty toothless nonetheless we respected her.
But what I am absolutely pissed off about is how the girls used to make up a mix of margarine, cocoa, sugar, curry powder, squash (basically anything edible in the locker)….this vile stuff was whipped together and aptly baptized MIXTURE which would then be fed to the masses at the dormitories in the hope to gain some body heat in the bitingly cold nights… I hated the stuff and those who like me avoided the stuff had dire warnings that with that direct cholesterol intake they were bound to turn into plump monsters. I bumped into one of those girls the other day…she looked radiant after 6 years of marriage and two kids…and me…how absolutely unfair that I turned to the bummy tummy mummy and she well...she looked like she was still a student in the debating club they were the hotties back then!
I was flattered though the other day when I visited the school to pick up long forgotten certificates (ha-ha they have archives of uncollected certificates dating back to the 60's) and some students recognized me and my work. Hmmm… at least I gained some bland levels of fame…I am not sure how flattered I should be because stories were also passed down that I was part of a group that staged the first strike in the school which got me two weeks suspension (ahem...everyone has a few skeletons) …
A lot of strange things went on in boarding school like the time one of the girls who had a peculiar laundry and showering phobia had inherited a total of 50 school shirts from former students in the school to avoid having to wash them though out the term. When the clean ones ran out she went through the dirty ones and powdered the collars so we won't notice. We could always smell her before we saw her. When the stink mixed with her Gucci perfume got too revolting we used the school disinfectant and showered her ourselves….but that's a memory trip for another day…So, enjoy your shower tonight, and scrub scrub scrub off all the scum of your otherwise busy day..
Its not so much that I simply feel nauseous when I recall my domestic science teacher …she had a perpetual sneer and I remember her pasty vanishing cream on her face like a circle round the face and red lipstick bottom lip only (she had a unique foul sense of fashion). I remember her prancing around looking at our stitches and cooking with disdain.
I still have night mares about her.
Well, truth be told, there were truly precious moments in high school. I remember our cook Maina. He was a sunny man with an impish smile and never gave more than three pieces of meat On Monday and Friday lunch…not a piece less or more..matter how enticing..err or not you were. That was the rule, three bits of dodgy meat a piece… it was the highlight our dreary days in school. And who could forget sausage on Sunday, to this day I have no idea what kind of sausage they were but we savored each morsel like it was a million dollar meal.
These days I tend to look back a lot with all this nostalgia..perhaps am getting old and mushy. But I sometimes find myself laughing out loud when I remember our matron who we called "sixie" cos she had six fingers on each hand. She used to prance stealthily like a cat around the corridors busting us in all kinds of horrible situations. She would twirl her keys on her extra pinky (this by the way terrified us) and her eyes bulged out in anger and her voice bellowed like thunder, "WHERE ARE YOU GOING AFTER LIGHTS OUT!" Most of the times she was harmless her bark was pretty toothless nonetheless we respected her.
But what I am absolutely pissed off about is how the girls used to make up a mix of margarine, cocoa, sugar, curry powder, squash (basically anything edible in the locker)….this vile stuff was whipped together and aptly baptized MIXTURE which would then be fed to the masses at the dormitories in the hope to gain some body heat in the bitingly cold nights… I hated the stuff and those who like me avoided the stuff had dire warnings that with that direct cholesterol intake they were bound to turn into plump monsters. I bumped into one of those girls the other day…she looked radiant after 6 years of marriage and two kids…and me…how absolutely unfair that I turned to the bummy tummy mummy and she well...she looked like she was still a student in the debating club they were the hotties back then!
I was flattered though the other day when I visited the school to pick up long forgotten certificates (ha-ha they have archives of uncollected certificates dating back to the 60's) and some students recognized me and my work. Hmmm… at least I gained some bland levels of fame…I am not sure how flattered I should be because stories were also passed down that I was part of a group that staged the first strike in the school which got me two weeks suspension (ahem...everyone has a few skeletons) …
A lot of strange things went on in boarding school like the time one of the girls who had a peculiar laundry and showering phobia had inherited a total of 50 school shirts from former students in the school to avoid having to wash them though out the term. When the clean ones ran out she went through the dirty ones and powdered the collars so we won't notice. We could always smell her before we saw her. When the stink mixed with her Gucci perfume got too revolting we used the school disinfectant and showered her ourselves….but that's a memory trip for another day…So, enjoy your shower tonight, and scrub scrub scrub off all the scum of your otherwise busy day..
Comments
or are they all incredible the same?
very cool!!!