Girls and bowel movements

Letters would usually be distributed around lunch time collected from Blue man up school. It was a time to catch up with news from the outside world and from home for some of us. Some lucky second formers were already receiving love letters but I certainly wasn’t among them.

Actually I frequently received snail mail from just one person—the woman who was taking care of my kid bro, birthed by my late mother on her death bed. I looked forward to the letters because I was anxious to learn how he was getting on. But I also dreaded them because there was always the chance that somebody would take a closer look at the handwriting and realize that it was penned by somebody who had hardly completed primary school. Naturally they wouldn’t know the story and I could only imagine all kinds of cruel jokes being crafted. Her letters were always brief and she would write in Swahili but I was always grateful for them and delighted to know the progress being made by the toddler and my other siblings whom I felt extremely responsible for being a first born and also because of our circumstances of being without a mother. Many times I would smile while reading the letters, or get extremely sentimental. Just the kind of things that would give the wrong impression to anybody carefully observing me because they were precisely the kind of reactions one would have reading a love letter from some girl. I am grateful that my fears were never realized.

I was one of the few second formers who slept in the third form dorm and most of them regularly received those valued letters from some lass. However some prominent characters whom I shall not expose did not and so they created this refrain that they would always repeat to pour cold water on the romantic exploits of others. “Yes, the girl was very cute and very sexy but even as you read their letters the fact was that she was human and subject to regular bowel movements. The whole idea was to focus on that which was only natural. It was hilarious the way they said it but I fear some characters took it to heart and avoided the girls even more.