How I wrote my Will, dug my grave

 Schools have just closed and August holidays are here with us. My cousin Soriala, who is in Class Six in a boarding school, came back complaining about her school and insisting that she wanted to be transferred to another school. Her reason? They were being pinched in school. Really? She should have gone to the school I went to. We received beatings that forced us to write Wills... as if we owned a thing! I can remember at some point, our Mathematics teacher told those of us who were poor in the subject to dig our graves behind the classrooms. Guess what, we neither died nor became mathematicians.

That was not the part that scared the hell out of me though. There were other things that made me shed tears every time I was reporting to school. If there is anything that can make my heart skip a beat, then it should be darkness. I hated walking out of the dormitory to the latrines in the wee hours of the night to answer the call of nature. I was not alone, we were a number of pupils who dreaded that. So we would hold our bladders tight and listen out to whoever would be brave enough to go out first. Once someone reached the door, you would see several people jumping from their beds in darkness to head out in a group.

All was well until our neighbourhood was invaded by roaming hyenas one night. You can imagine being told that hyenas were roaming outside the dormitories. They should have just told us it was dangerous and left it at that because the hyena theory didn't go down well with me. I used to sleep on the lower decker next to the door; what if a hyena accidentally walked in? I would be the first to join Bartholomew and Methuselah! Seriously, who wants to join them via the jaws of a hyena?

We were given a stern warning not to go out at night. Because of that, our caring head teacher bought us huge pails, actually super drums, to use any time we wanted to answer a short call at night. The super drums were positioned in the middle of the dormitory. Each dormitory was allocated one super drum. There were rules that went with it though; no one was supposed to use the super drums before 11pm. If you were caught using them before then, you would be punished the next day. Reason, if we started using them before 11, they would get full before morning. There was also a duty roster where two pupils were required to empty the super drum in their dormitory each morning.

It was not only painful to sit on the super drum but also quite a task to find a way to sit on it. For those of us who were short, it was a great struggle. in some cases, some pupils ended up falling into and tipping over the super drum. The results of that is a story for another day.

So we had this house-mother who was supposed to make sure all pupils were in bed every night and were ready on time each morning. She slept in her own room, which was an extension of the dormitory I slept in. I must say she gave me goosebumps every night. Any time someone used the super drums before 11pm, she would shout, "Beeeeeeryl! Nani huyoooo?"

I am one person who believes in ghosts and so when someone shouts out my name in the dark, it freaks me out! You can imagine the noise of the urine as it hits the bottom of the super drum followed by the sound of your name. Then immediately you would hear 'thup!', that was the sound of a short person jumping from the top of the super drum and dashing back to bed in darkness before 'Beryl' unmasked her to the house-mother.

Remember the urine was halted prematurely by the victim! I stayed strong through the five years and at no point did my parents listen to me when I said I wanted to changed schools. I survived!

So now Soriala wants to come back home and fool us into transferring her to another school just because of pinching? Mummy, if you are reading this, your dreams are not valid!

Photo: es.aliexpress.com