The train was also the affordable transportation that most local Primary Schools depended on for taking their students on educational field trips.
I never got a chance to ride the train for any of those trips. My mother, in her great wisdom, believed it was not safe for a girl to travel to far off places without parental supervision. Seriously mother? All the girls in my class traveled and their parents did not travel with them; what was my mother talking about? I had no chance of arguing my case because that was unacceptable in my family. When a parent said NO, that was the final word. So, I missed out on those important field trips, because mother said so. But I had my thoughts on that injustice even back then.
Education was very important to my parents. We were the kids who never missed a day of school even when we were sick. Mother always said “niukuhonera mbere” translation “you will feel better as you go”. But once school was out, we immediately became the labor force she needed to keep home and farm running. School trips usually took a whole day, meaning, mother had nobody to help her out especially with the afternoon chores which were endless. With that in mind, she needed one of us to stay behind. It could not have been one of the boys because they banded together and deciding which one of them would stay behind would have been hard for mother to ask, without seeming monstrous. The woman was smart, she did not want to antagonize five boys all at once. So, like the rule of the jungle, she preyed on the weak. She knew the boys would not make a case for me against one of their ‘kind’. I was toast. And with that, mother used the “girl” child safety excuse to keep me home for the day, while my brothers and the entire school had fun in places I had only heard about or read in books. Mother had me home as her helper on a ‘school day’ without any of the guilt she could have felt had she kept me home on a regular school day. It was a win win for her, but not so much for me. I never got a chance to ride the OlKalou train for all the years it ran through our town. Today, if you bring back the train, I will ride hanging on the doorway just to show mother. Just a wild thought.
Anyhow, my brothers traveled to Nyahururu one time and another time they traveled to Nairobi, visiting the National Museum, Animal Orphanage and many other places they talked about forever. I was jealous because of the passion with which they described their trips, you would think they traveled abroad. They also got to eat half a loaf of bread each with a bottle of soda. That was the other thing that made school trips so popular. Students got to eat bread and drink soda, delicacies they would normally not eat at home. I missed all that, thanks to mother.
There were only a handful of schools in OlKalou back then, yet, they utilized the train services for their transportation to those far away destinations. If the train services were restored in today’s OlKalou, I am picturing the number of schools that would utilize its services for field trips, science fairs, agricultural shows, sports events and much more.
Bring back the train and boost the Nyandarua economy while serving the residents with an essential service they could use.
