Ever been in such astonishing darkness that when you breathe in you feel darkness slide inside you? The kind of darkness that grips the earth in a tight fist. So dark you don’t recall what sunlight looks like? Now imagine driving down Mahi Mahiu -Narok road in that unforgiving pre-dawn darkness of 4am. Darkness literally pressing against the window. The car heater is on. You don’t know where you are, no context at all apart from the yellow lines on the road which race under your car and get swallowed by the darkness behind you. You are listening to heartbreak songs from the 90s because if you are going to listen to a love song it has to be a heartbreak song otherwise why bother with Celine Dion? You are thinking of all the heartbreaks you’ve had and how ridiculous and desperate it felt during that time. How dark it all seemed. How your emotions pendulumed between bitterness and desperation so many times, one could see it at the base of your throat thudding like a woodpecker’s beak.
You are listening to Pebbles and your heart is rushing with blood. Filling with swarms of buzzing bees. With bunches of beautiful flowers. Snowy flowers. Beyond the darkness is more darkness and it’s fine, you get used to it, in fact it becomes comforting because you are now a part of the darkness. You understand it. It can’t hurt you.
But then slowly you start seeing shapes outside, forms, the sketchy outline of a hill. The hazy form of a tree. Bridges no longer rush at you from nowhere. The world is suddenly taking shape. The darkness that seemed indomitable is suddenly running away, fearful of the light.
Then suddenly the sun rises behind you in sharp blasts of orange. Your car is instantaneously lit with warm light. It’s as if someone has suddenly squeezed oranges in the car. You look in the rear view mirror and you see her, a dawn so astonishing you pull over by the side of the road and you gawp at her. You think, damn, how can something so warm and comforting now turn out to be so harsh and mean later in the day? You raise your phone, like perhaps many people are doing at that exact moment, and she gives you her good side to take a photo. Heart full of warmth and reassurance, you drive towards Narok town.
You are in Narok County to look for a boy.
Actually, to look for a boy and a girl.
You check in at the Mara Frontier hotel. At the desk is a very very tall Maasai-looking girl with acres of smooth dark skin who takes your ID and scans it. Later, you join a small team from The School at breakfast, a buffet. You have liver and mandazi because who says you can’t have liver and mandazi? Mandazi, as an accompaniment, can go with anything but fish. It’s also the best type of mandazi; one that has gas in it. It’s the type of mandazi that you can use to scuba-dive given all that air in it. The type that looks pouty but once you touch it it sighs and collapses in your arms. It’s deceptive, yes, but there are worse things happening in the world.
Breakfast done, you jump into big land cruisers because where you are going is far and wild and you might get swept by rain. You drive onto the main road for a few minutes and then drive off onto a dusty road, clouds of dust in your wake. Clusters of manyattas run past you. You drive and drive, over hills and along fences made from sticks. After over an hour you stop somewhere and the driver sticks his head out the window and asks a man if he knows a boy by the name of so-and-so.
The man is suspicious. Who are you? Why are you looking for the boy? Where are you from? Satisfied we aren’t villains, he says the boy lives near that valley, he points with a finger bearing a dark nail like a bayonet with dried blood. “I can take you,” he offers. So he jumps into the car. He talks about how when he was a boy he left home to go find his wealth and came back a few years later with heads of goats. His mom handed him a wife. She was 12 years old. The next year she was pregnant. The driver gasps and says, “You married a child!” He shrugs. They have three children together. He has another wife with whom they have two children.
“Now you can’t marry them so young,” he said, “the government will jail you. Now they have to go to school. It’s important. School is important. My wives are now all going to school.”
They all live in the same manyatta. The wives each have a bed and he takes turns sleeping in each bed.
“Is there no jealousy?” The driver asks him.
“Why would they be jealous?” He asks. “I’m there, am I not?”
Outside, the earth is starting to boil from the heat.
In the valley, you reach a dead-end. Shrubs and branches scratch the car as the driver reverses. You try another road, up a hill, down a dry shrubby hill where you amble upon a man in a grey blazer and sneakers, standing between two women, his wives, you later learn. He’s holding a walking stick in one hand and a phone that is also a radio in the other. He’s got a weathered face and a set of small, suspicious, dark eyes that miss nothing. His women are in beads and shukas. The gentleman and your guy converse in rapid Maa. The man is the type accustomed to being waited upon to make a decision. “He’s a light boy?” He inquires. One of us in the car says, “yes, he is a light boy.”
He says there are two boys with that family name. The first one isn’t light but the second one lives down that road; take a left, drive right at the edge of the valley, it’s the manyatta at the end of that path.
The women remain silent.
Off we go again, down the shrubby hill. Past carcasses of trees, past trees with dusty leaves. We drive at the edge of the path, under patches of shadows cast by trees. We finally get to a humble boma. A cluster of people in shukas stare at our arrival. This is not a place accustomed to vehicles and strangers. There are cows. A goat turns to look at you. You look at it. It looks away, disinterested.
You wander away as the rest confer. You pee against a fence. If you are a lady you don’t pee against the tree. You just hold it inside. Like stifling a yawn. As you walk back you see two chairs in a state of despair behind a house. The chairs look intimate, like they had been conferring and you suddenly interrupted.
The boy no longer lives there, you learn. He moved elsewhere with his mother. You all bundle in cars and off you go again, all the way to the main road that is over an hour and a half away then head towards Nairobi, where after 40 mins, you get off the road onto dry, flat land without any life. When you run into two Maasai girls with colourful shukas flapping in the wind you stop and ask them about the light boy. They know of no light boy. You are frustrated, but the ladies from The School say it’s normal. “We can look for these kids for a whole day.”
Finally, after an hour, you find him.
Here is how you ended up there.
A few months ago this boy filled out a form from The School: Name, parents name if any, etc. He attached his birth certificate and his parents ID, if any. His parents filled sections of the form stating what they do, how much they own, what kind of structure they live in etc. This boy then answers some questions in the form; challenges he has gone through in his academic life, challenges in his community and how he solved them, what he has learnt in life, what his dreams are, what sport he likes. He then took the form to his headteacher who filled it, commenting on the child’s academic abilities, his family’s financial status, and his history in the school.
He then left that form at the nearest Mpesa shop or any UNHCR center where it was picked up, and then landed at The School along Mang’u road in Thika where a clutch of men and women went through his application and thousands of others, reading stories about domestic violence and abject poverty, sifting through these tales of woe and desperation to determine who is most needy. There are over 10,000 of these applications from all over the country and they only select 150. It’s not easy. “We don’t decide who gets in,” one tells you, “God decides.”
Their selection is then sent to another batch of people in a different room, who go through all of them and decide if they have met the criteria.
Once they have narrowed them down to a good number, they all go to these areas and they conduct interviews with these selected kids, to corroborate on what’s in the forms they filled. After a few weeks of deciding if the interviews reflected what was in the forms, they send a team to visit these kids in their homes to see if their situation is what they described.
And you will see quite a few of them. You will look for a girl for hours, through valleys and ridges, a river. You will ditch the vehicle and walk and you will find her in a small mudhouse, living with her mom, dad long fled. You will ask her questions, ask the mom questions and look into the mudhouse and you will be shocked at how a small, dark space like that can not only house humans, but can house many humans. It houses a family that has the love of the mother and in that very deplorable situation you will be surprised at the dreams this mother has for her daughter.
You will also learn that people are the same, they want the same things for themselves and their children and they fear the same things just like you do. But by a twist of cruel fate, poverty has brought them to their knees and they beg when they have reached the end of their tether and, be sure, this is the end of their tether. But then you will also discover the pride in them, because they seek dignity even if they lack and beg. They wash their tattered clothes and hung them. They tie their mangy hair when they hear ‘guests’ are coming. They apologise if they don’t have enough chairs for you, but then they offer you a jerrican. And it’s heartbreaking when you place some money into the mom’s toughened palms, the hands that have known hard labour, the hands that could easily have been a man’s hand. It’s not much, but insanely that’s the equivalent of what she makes in a week tilling land for neighbours. And she tries not to weep because she doesn’t want to embarrass you. But she ends up wounding you, with guilt.
Anyway, that’s how you ended up there, on that flat land, standing next to a manyatta, your heart breaking at this boy’s state. A bony dog lies under a shade by the house, eyes half closed. Old clothes flutter in the breeze from a clothesline.
There is a small tree where goats lie under to escape the heat. It’s a small manyatta that everybody lives in. The land is not theirs. Squatters. Dad died. Mom scrapes by. The boy, a very intelligent one, wants to be more, to do more. They all do, these desperate kids. They want to be lawyers and doctors and engineers but what they really want is to escape poverty and all of them say they want to come back home and help their mothers or fathers or their community.
So they filled the form and they prayed and suddenly there were two big cars and people asking him questions; how are you? Where is your dad? Where do you sleep? What do you do when you wake up? What do you dream of becoming? Who is your inspiration? What’s the name of that dog? The dog is called ‘dog’? “Oh he has no name, ha-ha I get it.”
Months pass and suddenly it’s admission day at The M-Pesa Foundation Academy. They come from all over; Marsabit, Moyale, Busia, Migori, Tana River, Kwale. Around 10,000 kids applied, only 100 were chosen. It’s hard to save everyone. They come with their parents and guardians or teachers, with their grandmothers who can’t speak anything but their language and with their aunts or neighbours. You can tell they are wearing their best clothes, which have clearly seen better days. They carry old bags, big paper bags. They are stunned to be here, intimidated by the modern sports facilities, the buildings, the lawns and sprinklers. They tiptoe around. They pass through admissions desks, their details logged in. They whisper their names. They whisper their age.
They are assigned an existing student who takes them to a massive gymnasium. There, they will be given everything new; underwear, nightwear, uniforms, vests, shoes for school and for leisure, sweaters, weekend clothes, fleece, belt, trolley bag, face towel, swim bag, swimming costume. Everything they are wearing from home will be given back to their parents to go back with.
You walk around and watch them. They have never owned anything new before. They have never worn shoes from a box, or a blazer. You go through a corridor and see a student help another boy dress up. He helps him button his blazer buttons. He tells him, “you have to shower twice a day now, if you don’t you will be in trouble with the school.”
“How often did you used to bathe?” You ask, leaning against the doorway.
He blushes with embarrassment. “Once or sometimes never,” he says.
“Yeah, I used to be the same,” the student says. “But here, they are serious about personal hygiene.”
None of these boys and girls will pay a single coin to get an education here. But the school will always remind them of who they are; Thinkers, Doers and Leaders.
When you ask them how they are feeling, they all say they are surprised at how beautiful the place is. They all mention the facility. The lawns. You were surprised at the facility the first time you saw IT. It’s modern and Ivy league. Close to 1,000 students enrolled so far, all fully sponsored and 600 already graduated.
Most of them have never used a toothbrush or toothpaste or forks or pillows or even beds. They have never opened a tap or drawn a curtain. Or switched on a light. The culture shock will be immense and so in the coming weeks they will be put through an orientation program. They will be taught how to use cutlery, how to flash a loo, how a shower works. There will be medical and mental health screening, a school tour [which you can also do virtually HERE, school value and expectations, pastoral and spiritual care, philosophy, principles. They will be handed gadgets. This is high school happening but hybrid. It will feel to them like sleeping in a desert and waking up in the north pole.
Six months later, you will go back to their school and you will look for the maasai boy with dusty feet you met months earlier or the girl with dry cracked lips from Tharaka Nithi and you will not find them. This is because they will have been replaced by different people who smile, look you in the eye while talking, confident, happy, their true personalities yielded.
You will be tempted to use the word miracle to describe what you are witnessing and you will be justified.
**
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