And Then Life Happens Read Online Free

that, by moving to boarding school, I had lost the safe space of my home. I must have felt cast out. And although I do not remember clearly the separation from my biological mother, Kezia, two years earlier—when I was only four years old—I would imagine that must have also left its marks. So I most likely experienced my stay at Mary Hill Primary School as a double banishment from a familiar environment: I had to part from my biological mother and from my second mother, my father’s American wife.
    The strictly regimented life of the boarding school was frightening for me. In class, it was the nuns who scared me. I seem to recall that they threatened to lock us in a “dungeon” if we weren’t good. None of us children knew for sure whether this dungeon really existed, but our fear of it was so great that we preferred not to find out. Out of sheer terror, I often did not dare to ask whether I could go to the bathroom during class. Once I waited so long that, to my despair, a warm stream suddenly ran down my leg to the floor.
    Things did not go much better for us in the living quarters. There, too, we were surrounded by nuns, who watched us like hawks. On both ends of the dormitory, a crucifix hung on the wall, and there was constant praying, to which I was unaccustomed. My father, as mentioned, was not religious, and my stepmother Ruth was Jewish, though she didn’t practice her faith.
    Each evening before going to bed and each morning immediately after getting up, we had to kneel down in front of our beds facing the crucified savior. At bedtime, the nuns painstakingly made sure that our hands lay virtuously on the blanket. Why that was so important to them was a mystery to me at the time. At home, I was used to covering myself up to my neck. With my arms lying “out in the open,” I had trouble falling asleep.
    One night the nun on duty caught me with my hands under the blanket. I was startled out of sleep in confusion as someone yanked the blanket from my body. Completely bewildered, I saw the Sister standing in front of me and heard her scolding me, without understanding what I—while fast asleep!—had done that was so bad. Only years later did I realize that the nuns wanted to prevent us from sinning under the blanket by playing with certain body parts—even though we were only six, at most seven! Eventually, my father had to give in to my obvious unhappiness and take me out of Mary Hill Primary School.
    My older brother Abongo didn’t fare much better. He, too, attended a top boarding school, the Nairobi School, which was in the middle of the capital. And he, too, was apparently unhappy there and loathed life in that educational institution. But he expressed his aversion in a different way. Instead of shedding tears, he made other children cry, by getting into fights with them. My father was summoned to his school so often that he eventually realized there was no point in leaving Abongo there any longer. So both of us returned home—I was in second grade, my brother in third—and spent the rest of our primary school years happily as day pupils at Kilimani Primary School. At that time, my stepmother Ruth gave birth to my brother Opiyo, her second son.
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    The harmonious family life did not last long. While I was still waiting for the results of my final primary school exams, my father and Ruth got a divorce. When I was accepted into Kenya High School, with my thirteenth birthday approaching, my stepmother had already moved out and had taken my two younger brothers, Okoth and Opiyo, with her.
    My father and stepmother’s divorce was hard on me. A large void opened up. Fortunately, I could escape it to some extent with the entrance into boarding school life. The new school would turn out to be a blessing for me.
    When I arrived at Kenya High School, people seemed to have heard of me already. The word was that I was the girl with the