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For those who may not be frequent readers of this column, in December, my house girl took a Christmas break and I got a temporary help in the name of Stella.
Stella, the adorable teenage daughter of my neighbour, had just sat her KCSE exams.
The few weeks she was taking care of my kids, though she had her dramas, she won our hearts.
My kids and I grew so fond of her, when it was time for my house girl to come back, it was painful letting go.
But because it was a short-term arrangement, I had to let go and move on. After my house girl came back, Stella used to come to check up on us daily as she had developed a special bond with my daughter Tasha. But since the KCSE results were announced, I noticed that the outgoing Stella had been missing in action. Curious about her whereabouts, I went to her place last weekend. You will never believe what was happening. “Since the results came out and she found out what she had scored, Stella recoiled into a cocoon and has since been locking herself in her room. She only comes out to take stuff from the fridge and recoils back to her hideout,” her distraught mother told me as we chatted. And her reason for shutting herself from the cruel world – scoring a C- in her exams. “She thinks she is a failure and has let her dad and I down. She has lost so much weight and does not care about her physical appearance, which was everything to her before. She thinks she is a loser,” her mother poured out her heart to me. Everywhere she looks, it’s winners being celebrated. Stella was so depressed her mother was worried that she might commit suicide. That is what a system that is so academically oriented does to our children. The 8-4-4 is so graded-oriented, the learners who do not meet the expected threshold feel like societal failures. But even as we celebrate the winners in national exams, let’s also remember that there is a group who for one reason or another scored low grades but that does not mean they are dunderheads. I know people who scored miserable grades in national exams; yet through their determination and hard work, they have turned out fairly well. As parents, we need to stop being so obsessed with a child’s marks but instead look at their growth and development holistically.
Luckily for Stella, I gave her mother contacts of a teen counselor who is now helping the young lady rebuild her eroded self-esteem.
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