Meghshala-Ontum denizens always sigh and wear their patient expression when I start to tell a story. It is also true that usually, my stories start somewhere in Africa. So shall this blog. So run and get your patient expressions, people, and put it on. Because, here goes! I lived in Nairobi, Kenya for five years from 2001. We lived, my husband and I, in a residential locality called Lavington. Right opposite our house, was Muthangari Primary School that had some 600 students. I worked in an international school, which was a right turn out of my gate, left on James Gichuru Road, across the Waiyaki Way and all the way down Peponi Road …. and a whole SOLAR SYSTEM away from Muthangari Primary School. Where, on this path, was the boundary of the solar system? The kids would begin to trickle into Muthangari at the unreal hour of 6am, sleepy, slouchy, rubber-slippered. They were walked to the end of the road by their mothers who were probably domestic workers. Their clothes were too big for them, because their brothers, whose hand-me-downs they were, were much older than them. If they had on shoes, they were too big for them. And the socks flopped over their shoes or sneaked into their shoes under their heels. They, for sure, had had no breakfast. Lunch was at least 7 hours away. And so they dragged themselves to school, trailing their school bags on the dusty road behind them. Muthangari had a boundary wall that was built out of cement posts and torn wire-fencing. The gate hung off its hinges, the walls were sorely in need of a coat of paint. The windows had broken panes with mud splatters on them. BUT … and there is always a BUT …. there were wonderful, tall, well-grown trees in the school yard casting deep shadows over the grass. Many a Messi or Pogba played in these shadows, I can guess, but not many showed off their ball-control skills on the fields of Europe. These Messi-s and Pogba-s still play in the evenings, maybe, for the fun and joy of football, but only after loading farm produce onto trucks, or parking their taxis for the night and joining some players under lights. Into our second year in Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta declared that any child or adult who wanted to go to school should be allowed admission into the country’s completely free basic education system. What an uplifting promise to give the Kenyan population and what a difficult promise it was to keep! I noticed the effect clearly in Muthangari. The trickle turned into a flood. Almost a thousand kids were coming to the school after this announcement. A new and young Principal cycled in on a Monday morning soon after. The Principal, who I shall call Joe Head, because I have not asked his permission to use his real name, asked the parent body who among them could fix the wire-fencing. And the windows. He painted the walls himself after school. His kid brother cut back the unruly grass. And I watched from behind my window. And I thought, “Right. Education is different from short grass, Mr. Head. Education is about textbooks, and tests and lessons of Math and Graphs and Wars.” Fortunately, Mr. Head did not hear me. He knew something I did not. In two weeks the first thing that I noticed was that the socks on the street were pulled up. And the students were walking straighter. And there was the sound of young laughter all the way to the end of the street. The bags hung carefully from their shoulders, and some older children had books open in their hands. I drove the rest of the way to my school in silence – silence from the radio, from my words, from my thoughts. But my heart sang and I carefully listened to the tune. And I smiled, maybe! I did what I could, with paying the salaries for an extra teacher and funnelling the retired textbooks from my school to Muthangari. The first kids I saw every day were the Muthangari kids. They were bright-eyed with blinding-smiles at the ready. The year I left Kenya, Muthangari was declared as one of the top 20 schools in the country. It started with socks that were pulled up. And smiles of children. This is the keystone on which Meghshala Trust and Ontum grow. We will not let down Muthangari. I promise you that!
