Dry Beds A Rarity

In lower primary,a shower was a once a week issue.If you were not in boarding school,and I wasn’t.I remember the only thing that made me and my siblings different was that we took a shower twice.That was on Wednesday evening.The next one would be on Sunday morning.
Ignore the fact that we wet our beds like taps gone loose.The night mishap was courteously referred to as-planting cabbages.
I grew up next to the Aberdare Forest and if you sipped some water straight out of the tank in the morning and spat out,most of your teeth would follow and the rest would become very loose.
So a regular bath was out of the question,incase you catch pneumonia .The irony was that you would be watering nursery beds until dark barefoot, and in the morning you jumped out of bed and out into the dew.Yet a warm birth was out of the question. In class,there would be a mixture of smells; ammonia in various stages of combustionThough with time,the smell would grow on you and what may have come out strange might have been a thoroughly scrubbed body with the smell of Rexona-still lingering.Many of us used soap smear on our legs in the morning,but it wasn’t scented;just your usual bar soap. Others used melted cooking fat or milking jelly.The teachers had become accustomed too, they didn’t seem to mind.
In class one;however,we had one teacher who causes shivers in my spine to this day.He used to carry out checkups on us daily.He checked everything and for everything.He checked for fleas and lice,long nails,pants,kamisi,,and-underwear-for the boys.He checked for torn pockets, chewed pullover cuffs. Woe to you if you had calves in your herd.They have a tendency to chew on wet clothes.I remember one of my sweaters,the best I had,grey in color,being chewed to the elbow.But the calf that did that learnt it’s lesson
An extra piece had to be crocheted from the elbow to the wrist.It gave the sweater a very table mat look to it.One day the teacher asked-don’t your cows have a pen?-

He checked for hankies and black necks, He embarrassed the boys who didn’t have innerwear by giving them a square piece cut out from a sisal sack-to go sew themselves some-He cut of people’s hair, in a zigzag pattern show it was longer that the acceptable 1cm from the scalp
He laid canes on girls who had lice on their bodies
He cursed our parents and told us how we all would turn out to nothing.He knew our family histories and used that against us.One time he beat me so much I had bumps a my entire behind up to my neck-because I couldn’t speak proper Kiswahili.I always got mixed out and spoke mother tongue, swaying it a bit to sound like kiswahili.I swore I’d never fail the blasted language.
The teacher never complained about the urine thick air of the class room.He never mentioned it
My desk mate gave off so bad sometimes I wanted to throw up,but I guess I had the same effect on her.We sat as far from each other as we could, I remember
One night I was asked to say the night prayer at home.I asked God to help me stop planting cabbages
They said it was wrong to ask God such things.
Though it wasn’t immediate,I stopped wetting my bed at a decent age,and when I had a relapse,it was out of fear of going out alone at night.Who knew what animal may have strayed from the Aberdare forest?
In Highschool,I once wet my bed.I slept on the upper bunk and you can imagine the apologies I had to make.The night before I had drunk cocoa and mugs and mugs of juice.
I went off juice for the rest of the year.