ONE OF THOSE DAYS

It was another hunger themed Saturday at school; I had missed the previous evening dinner and the morning dinning too. You see, the thing about boarding school is that there’s no parent to check up on you and your state of health. And this was another one of those broke periods when my provisions had reached their elastic limits.

As I sat on my bed, clenching my growling belly, I couldn’t help but check the time every one second. I tried to sleep but I found out that a food deprived tummy can get angry too. Well, the only consolation I had was that I wasn’t alone in this predicament. Just opposite my bunk bed was my friend Cynthia, also suffering the same predicament. It was only 11:00am, and afternoon dinning wasn’t until 2:00pm. We tried our ‘cassava cereal without floating nuts (no floating nuts)’ but it only made for appetizers, the hunger only increased, while our bellies waited for the main course.

The school was almost empty because we were meant to be on mid-term break, some of us in final year decided to stay back, so there were no activities to keep my mind busy at that moment.

At 12.00pm with no dinning bells and no positive signal coming from the dining area… my friend, Cynthia and I hatched a plan… we decided to leave school to a bukka to buy food… we had mofty (contrabands of course!), plus it was weekend, people usually came in and out of school because our school was a shorter pathway, in through the front gate and out, through the back gate.    

On our way out, we looked at the mirror in horror! We still looked like bloody secondary school girls! What with our corn rows and all. So we went back to loosen them and pack our hair back… we decided to use the front gate because security at the time was tighter at the back gate… students tended to us the back gate to skip classes.

With our hearts almost beating out of our chests, we passed through the front gate. We could feel the gateman’s hard penetrating stare on our backs… at a safe distance from the front gate we begun jumping like little puppies and laughing our butts out.

Well, we were out of the school gate but our mission and destination was closer to the back gate, so we had a hell of a trek on our hands, however not long after our little victory dance, Cynthia’s sandals got cut. We had to find a shoe maker and we had to find one fast, the directions we got were all contradicting.

‘Oh, just a little more further down, then take the first turning by your right and second turning by your left’, said a woman carrying a little baby girl who was wailing with no drop of tear on her cheek.

And then another direction ‘oh no no, not first turning by your right, its first turning by your left and second turning by your right!’, by another young boy who looked like he had seen far too much for his own good.

After much ‘merry go round’, we finally found the shoe maker (not the bukka). And got her sandals fixed, now we had to find our way out of the maze to the bukka. Another, thirty minutes, and we were out of the maze, staring at the CLOSED bukka!

Sadly, we went back to school through the back gate which was closer, it was already twenty five minutes past two! Because of hunger, we had loosened our hair, won our contraband mofty, risked suspension to go on a futile journey and missed dinning in the process, we carried our sad little selves back to the our hostels but as we walked back we back we heard Amina, call out our names, asking us if we weren’t going for dinning. At that moment, we turned and looked at the dinning, it was still opened! We quickly ran to our rooms, changed into our day wears and ran back to the dinning and just as one of the cooks was closing the door, we entered the dinning and the doors were shut behind us! Lucky us! We made dinning this time!