The bell rang at 11:10

Every day, for four years in high school, the bell would ring at exactly 11:10am. This was when we would get to enjoy a cup of tea, and when one is lucky, escorted with buns or chalos (extremely sweet and oily maandazis). I do not know where the name came from, but they were addictive. Their sugar balanced out the blandness of the black tea that was being served. This is just one of the random memories I have about my time in high school – a boarding school.

When I was first joining boarding schools, I went for an interview in a certain catholic school. I passed, and was among the top five, but they only picked two students, and we later learnt they also picked some others as long as the parents were willing to pay something extra. I am grateful that I didn’t end up going to that school. I came to meet with someone who was there and when we were exchanging trauma stories, hers were just pitiable.

See, I was never forced to go to boarding school. It was actually my decision. I went at 10 years old. My cousins who had gone a year earlier, told me about how they had unlimited supply of snacks, and money. That is all it took to convince me to go. I had no problem shaving my hair for it, hair grows back. But now that I think of it, they had no justifiable reason why we couldn’t have long hair.

The boarding schools I went to are both located in cold places. A simple school sweater was never enough against the extreme colds we would experience in the mornings and evenings. Having a clogged chest became the norm. The worst part was that in one of the schools (high school), we were not even allowed to wear other sweaters, even when they were the same colour as the school ones. Should you be found with one, it would immediately be confiscated, and one day, you may see part of it being used as a duster – at best. Otherwise, they were all stored in one room next to the deputy’s office, while people froze. The logic still doesn’t make sense to me. In later years, they introduced jumpers. It really is true, your school improves when you leave.

I joined boarding school when the school had not dug a borehole. They were still in the process of thinking about it. In my first term, I remember the shock I felt when the bell rang for games and instead of preparing to go to the field to play and relax, my fellow students were running with buckets towards the gate. I didn’t know where they got buckets two seconds after the bell rang, or why they were at the gate with said buckets, barely five seconds after. Even in our class, the teacher had stopped talking immediately the bell started ringing and was out before it stopped. My classmates were equally at the gate with the entire school. I didn’t know what was going on. So I went to my sister’s class and even there was empty. She was also not in class. (My sister and I joined at the same time). I then saw some kids younger than me also running towards the gate and asked them what was going on. One shouted back while still running, “tunaenda kuchota maji”. Meaning ‘we are going to fetch some water’. I didn’t have my bucket with me, as it was locked in the dorms. I didn’t know what to do, and by the time I could begin to think about it, the gate was opened, and the entire school was gone. I just sat in class and waited. About thirty minutes later, students started coming back with buckets of water. This happened the entire break time, until supper time at around 6pm. That evening, I was lucky to have some water for use because of my sister.

The water was being fetched from a river a couple of kilometres away. We would leave the school, run towards the main road, which was almost a kilometre away, cross the main road (busia road), busy as it was, pass through the market, and keep going downhill for almost three kilometres to where the river was. Now the trick was to fetch the water closer to where the river plants were, just along the edges of the river. The water was cleaner that side. Then we would walk back to school carrying buckets of water on our heads. We would leave the river with full buckets and arrive at the school with at least quarter of the water poured on the road, and on ourselves.

On the dry days, the school would organise for a water truck. On cold days, which were also wet days, we just had to hope and pray that we don’t slip and injure ourselves on the way down the river, or up the river. Some fell, got hurt, but it was part of life, we had to shake it off.

When the borehole stopped being an idea, and was actually dug, the relief we felt cannot be contained in words.

Now, there are two things I vowed to myself I will not go through even if they were marketed as ‘healthy’ and a show of how hardworking someone is. Waking up before the sun is out, and showering with cold water.

In primary school, we used to be woken up with a loud bell at 5am. The bell was made of an old tire rim, and would be hit with a metallic rod. We got so conditioned to the sound of the metal rod being dragged along the tire rim, that sometimes, we were up just by that sound alone. The actual hitting of the rim would find us already outside. It was always very cold, but we were expected to bathe, clean the classes, toilets, drainages, compound, and be in class by 5:30am. Yes, we made it happen, but by the time we were in class, most people were dozing off. Unlike high school, we actually had classes during our morning preps and night preps. The concept of personal time for personal studies was a miss. In high school, we woke up at whatever time we could, as long as we were in class by 4:45am. I have not recovered from that.

There’s another thing I still can’t stand from my time in boarding schools. Pit latrines. To date, I cannot comprehend pit latrines. I mean call me spoilt, or entitled, but me and pit latrines, a big no. In primary school, we had some that were so neglected. The floors were completely eroded, and whenever they got wet – weather from the rains or even in the mornings when students would use them as bathrooms, maggots would come out. Not one, not two, an entire grumble. Even just thinking of them makes my skin crawl. Some, they looked like they were minutes from collapsing, and we still had to use them! High school was no different. It would be a big risk for one to go to the toilets alone.

In the boarding schools I attended, I did say cleaning the school was on us. I will not talk about that, but let me go to the side effects of the same. Those who were tasked to clean the toilets, or bathrooms would sometimes be given the disinfectants to use. Many had reactions and injuries from the same. The spaces between their fingers would tear, bleed, and sometimes even pus would come out of them. In primary school, during the assembly, we would occasionally hear one or two students cry their lungs out from the dining hall, which also served as the school matron’s place. She would be forcefully squeezing the pus out of people’s fingers, and sometimes toes. You could feel the pain from the screams.

Being sick in a boarding school would mean one or two things – either you get proper treatment, or you power through it. On rare occasions, you’d go home. The first option never used to happen. The best treatment one would be given was painkillers. Remember I said the boarding schools I went to were all located in cold places. Being sick became a norm in the schools. You would wake up in the wee hours of the morning, on an extremely cold day, shower with cold water, wear the most basic sweater, and go to class freezing. In case you felt any chest pains, you had to power through it. Because one, the school nurses will not believe you, and two, the students would make you feel like a weakling. I know so many people who had to nurse pneumonia because of this.

I have been sick three times in my life that I can remember well. And one of those time, I was in high school. I don’t know what happened, but when I went to get medication from the nurse, she kept giving me Panadol. One day I was just too weak to go to class, so after getting my usual dose of Panadol, I took a nap in one of the beds. (The sick bay was just a small wing of one of the dormitories). Unfortunately for me, I ended up in the sick bay for almost three days. I could barely eat, barely sleep, barely talk or walk. I was in pain. My friends decided to call the deputy principal. When she eventually came to the sick bay, her first words were, “Paula is pretending. Tell her to get up you will see we can walk to the gate”. I couldn’t make it past the door. It was only after test that they contacted my parents. They didn’t take me to any hospital or clinic, just immediately called my parents. When we left the school, we went straight to hospital and given two choices – to be admitted immediately, or to be given intravenous medication daily. I chose option two. It turns out, I had a severe case of malaria that was untreated for weeks. I lost so much weight that time. But you know what the nurse told me when I went back? “Usiwai kuja nikutibu. Enda nyumbani kwa baba yako”. ‘Never come to me for treatment. Just go home to your father’. Do you know why? Because she got yelled at for giving me Panadol for one week, when I was having a serious case of malaria. True to her word, she refused to treat me all my high school days. She even refused to keep my eye medication. I had to have my classmates assist me with it.

When I say one of our options while unwell was to power through it, I mean it. One day while getting out of bed in the morning, I landed on my shoes and felt a crack on my ankle. I was sleeping on a top bank, so I always had to jump to climb down. I assumed it was nothing, picked up my bucket, and ran to the bathrooms. It was on my way back that I realised I couldn’t walk. I had to limp back. I thought it was a small sprain that would pass with time, and how wrong I was. By the time I was getting to our cube, my right leg was swollen at the ankle. It was almost three times its size, felt hot, and was red. That is when it hit me just how much pain I was in. Remember the nurse who vowed not to treat me, I limped to her office when it was bright enough for me to see, and true to her word, she ignored me. I had no choice but to go to class. I was in extreme pain for days, and couldn’t wear shoes. Any time I would meet with a teacher on duty, I told them I was from the nurse and showed them my swollen foot. It took the scouts in our class to forcefully massage my leg every morning and evening for it to eventually heal.

Boarding school food is not one to write home about. I know right now the deal is eating boiled foods all the time, but when we millennials say no to that, understand that is what we grew up with. Saltless, tasteless, boiled food. Day in, day out. There are some foods I still can’t imagine eating willingly, cabbage tops the list.

Don’t even get me started on the academics’ part of boarding schools. That is trauma to be unpacked by someone else, or on a different day.

I went to boarding school at 10 years old. It was my choice at the time, and because of that, I feared saying it was awful. I didn’t know how to say I hated it. Were there good times, yes. Some moments with friends. In fact, my closest friends to date are from high school. I also had to learn independence, financial management, and a lot more. But you know what, I could have learnt all these in any school if the curriculum allowed for it.

Right now, should the conversation about abolishing boarding schools come up, I will always be for it. And if it is ever up to me, I would get rid of boarding schools. Completely.