A student from this environment in OlKalou was now put in the same classroom with a student from a prestigious well equipped primary school, where their only focus was education with all the facilities, support and materials they needed to succeed. Is there any fairness in this? None at all if you look at it from the eyes of a victim.
Looking back now, I chose to see it with the eyes of a victor. When you are from OlKalou, how do you compete with those titans who are on a whole different level of learning. You don’t. Why? Because life is never a level playing field. Our circumstances made us aware we were the bottom of the barrel, completely rock bottom, meaning, there was no other way to go but up.
We had to work on our language skills first before we could even start understanding whatever else was taught in other subjects. We buried ourselves in books in the library. None of us had ever seen so many books in one place. We tried speaking in English amongst our “Coffee Pickers” club, however broken, shrubbing and all, away from the earshot of our fluent English speakers in our class. “Grandys, ret us ngo to the ndinning loom”. We acknowledged the fact that we did not know much English, written or otherwise and we keenly paid attention in class when grammar was taught. We listened to the way our teachers constructed their sentences and we absorbed every word. We were like sponges soaking up water. Our fluent classmates did not pay much attention because they thought they were good already. Before we knew it, we were scoring higher grades in language than they did. We scored higher grades in other subjects as well because we now understood them better.
We came from tough circumstances and we finally realized education was our only ticket to a better life outside of our rural villages. Our efforts paid off big time. When the Form Four exams came around and the results were posted on the school notice board, the “Coffee Pickers” topped the Division One slot, with just a few in strong Division Two. The ‘urban elites’ of our class occupied the bottom half of Division Two and claimed the Division Three slot uncontested. When we returned for “A” levels, our class was full of Coffee Pickers with just a few of the urban “elites”. After the two years of “A” levels, almost the entire bunch made it to University and the few who missed narrowly went to top level colleges.
Today, I see Coffee Pickers everywhere running big corporations, heading schools and colleges and other high profile jobs. The playing field may not be level, but you play your best game at your corner of the field whatever the terrain, keeping your eyes firmly on the goal without letting the other players distract you. That is how you compete, by winning when it counts.
