As teenagers, with hormones bursting at the seams, looking for girls was something we did with overwhelming dedication. But then the only time we met these girls were during opening and closing days.
Going to school, there was a dip that often acted like prison bars slamming home. When that ‘monyimo’ (seven seater matatu with a light snout) briefly created turbulence when going over that river near Tambach Training Teachers College, that’s when we knew it was for real.
The next thing would be to create our own calendars, marking off each day with the diligence of a surgeon. A week or so later, we would get used to the life of high school.
Funkies came and letters came too and then almost suddenly closing days arrived bearing gifts like a politician in a church.
Some wanted to rush home and hug their mothers, but many of us wanted to hang around Eldoret town for as long as possible. We would walk into supermarkets, from Tuskys to Naivas to Nakumatt to Uchumi, looking at products as if we had won lotteries.
Meeting a girl in these places, or when you had secured one during one of those 'funkies' presented an opportunity to impress her. Especially when it was opening day.
What we did was push a large trolley, as large as our dreams, cart around picking stuff. Five litres of juice here, four kilograms of sugar there, one kilogram of a blue band here…just the large of everything. When the trolley is full, and the girl awed beyond comprehension, we would engineer a disappearing act, just like how money disappears in public coffers.
In a quick yet unalarmed move, we’d abandon the trolley full of stuff by one corner and engage our teenage limbs towards the exit. We had to do this surreptitiously to avoid being spotted by the attendants and the crush who we are abandoning.
Thereafter, we would go to another supermarket, pick a single tissue, a bar of soap and a couple of pens and head to school. Then we’d wait for the letter to come if the girl was thoroughly impressed by our fake richness. Sometimes the letters came, sometimes they didn’t.
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