Sundays were confused days for us. Saturday had just come and gone, the free Sunday loaf would be a forgotten story now and Monday would be staring at us with its ugly face. The sadness would be due to the harsh reality that nobody from home had visited the previous day, and if they had they left you little money, so little that your creditors would scoop away three quarters that same day and throw you back to where you had been before. Random students would have descended on your palace and borrowed the few chapatis your mom or sisters had brought, leaving you with just the soap, tissue paper, toothpaste and tomato sauce. These too would be borrowed one by one as the days progressed. Sunday morning preps was the most wasted three hours in that school. Those who had received letters from their girlfriends in other schools the previous day would be reading and rereading them to confirm they did not miss anything. The rest of us just made noise, sharing stories that were mostly not true. True stories only existed the first two weeks after opening day after which they dried out and fiction took over at its best. We even had this boy (name withheld) who was notorious for plagiarism. He would sit with you, listen to your story, internalize it, repackage it well with a few more lies then go narrate it to someone else like it was his own, with himself as the new starring. We preferred those Sundays we went to church at the local Pentecostal just outside the school. (Excerpt from Five Long Years by Hillary Lisimba)
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 05:19:43 +0000
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