From his business travels, my father sometimes happened to pass close to some of our schools on his way home to OlKalou. If it was closing day, he stopped by and picked one or two of us up for a ride home. You would think that was a good thing, right? Not to us, it wasn’t. First off, nobody wanted to sit in the middle, putting you right next to our father in his pick up truck. But somebody had to, and especially me being the girl, I was always thrown in the middle next to this man I never wanted to brush shoulders with, ever.
But the discomfort of sitting next to him was nothing compared to the content of his lecture for the near 200 kilometer journey. First we were ripped apart for our performance. There was enough time to go through the report forms subject by subject, pausing after each for harsh commentary. By the time we were done with the report forms, we were somewhere negotiating the wild twists and turns at Mount William (Kia Wiriamu) as we called it, meaning we were halfway through the journey home.
We fell quiet for a while as our stomachs turned looking at the rock wall to our right and the cliff to our left with only a guard rail marking the edge of the road and the dropping of the cliff just inches away. That was a hair raising nine kilometer ride, made worse by warnings posted all over “Beware of falling rocks”. You did not see a human being or a building anywhere on that nine kilometer stretch except for a small Chapel tacked somewhere in the middle. It was well maintained and we wondered if anybody lived there in that lonely, isolated building. We never saw anybody there, not even a car parked outside. It was a mysterious place that everybody called “Kamuthigiti ga Italiani” Italian mosque. Was it a chapel or a mosque, nobody ever stopped there to find out. But word had it that the Italians were brought in by the British Colonists to curve out the road from the escarpment rock. I can believe that because on the rock wall to our right, you could see it was clearly chiselled out to make room for the road at the edge of the cliff. Story has it that a lot of Italians died while working on this dangerous project and that is when they constructed that Chapel where they gathered to pray. I am sure somebody has the accurate historical facts on this, so I move on.
We held our breath as our father negotiated the sharp winding curves along Kia Wiriamu, and we all sighed relief when we reached Mai Mahiu. Pheew!! Our father also relaxed, enough to start spotting people who were behaving badly. If he saw somebody crossing the road carelessly without looking, a tout hanging dangerously on the door of a moving bus, a cyclist riding too close to the road or the load on his bicycle not properly secured or a car overtook us at high speed, the wrath of their combined mistakes was directed at us. He reminded us how mindless and careless people can be, like the ones we just witnessed, putting their lives and others at risk and he hoped that is not the type of adults we were planning to become. We answered in unison a resounding NO, NO, NO. It was the only acceptable answer. We were at such close proximity to our father in a very confined space, we could not afford to even roll our eyes. This continued all the way home.
The moment we parked outside our house, we jumped out like steam released from a pressure cooker. Our siblings who had arrived home earlier by public transportation looked at us sympathetically asking “wooi, wooi, wooi, wooi, mwoka na mzee? Ooooo poleni sana” Translation: “oh, oh, oh, you came home with father? Oooooh we are soo sorry”. They knew. They had all been there and did not wish that trip on anybody. It was that bad, and then some.
Who wants that ride home after three months of boarding school? Every closing day for all our high school years, we all kept our fingers crossed, hoping he did not show up at our schools to take us home. A bus ride home was perfectly okay for us.
