Early in the morning

Every weekday morning I try to be at the gate to our compound at about 6:45 a.m. to greet students coming to school. When we’re back in the UK any time around 6 a.m. feels like an alien time zone, especially in the late autumn and winter months. Out here in Kenya it’s hard to have a lie in. Early morning is a great time as the birds start to get the day going, the sun starts beaming and the piki-piki motor bike taxis roar up and down our road.

To be honest I only really catch the stragglers from the High School as they come through the gates. Most of the students are in their classrooms ready to go by about 6:35. I’m usually joined by the ‘teacher on duty’ for the fifteen minutes before the bell rings for the first lesson of the day. We check on ties and tidiness and at five to seven, start chivvying the late arrivals in. I know the same scene plays itself out in schools at the beginning and end of the school day all over the world. It’s a bit of a ritual, but like most rituals it is reassuringly familiar and settling. 6:55 is the significant boundary time for late arrivals. At 6:55 I step out of the compound to the side of the road, looking for green shirted students in the distance who now know they will have to run the last couple of hundred yards if they’re going to get to their lessons on time. It’s generally the same students. It becomes a bit of a game.

Every morning I’m amazed how courteous, smart and ‘serious’ our students are. In the UK I used to dread the prospect of a uniform crackdown in school, as it would inevitably lead to a week or so of generally tedious confrontations with students who frequently didn’t really want to be in school in the first place and who couldn’t care less about the uniform regulations that we imposed on them. I remember feeling the same when I was a teenager. After the crackdown we’d return to the normal rules of engagement, having achieved nothing. It would be untrue to say that we don’t have any challenges with our students. We do. But they tend to be a result of their taking their education very seriously rather than the generational conflict that plays itself out in so many classrooms in more ‘developed’ countries.

Standing, first thing in the morning, by the side of our now tarmacked road, reminds me how fortunate I am to be out here, doing what I’m doing. It’s easy for me to be at work on time – I just have to get up and walk out of my front door. It sometimes seems a bit of a cliché to talk about the effort that young people have to make to get to school in Africa. It doesn’t make it any less true or impressive. It’s not just the distance that some of our students walk either – it’s the walk in the dark that they have to make when they’re aiming to be in by 6:30 and the mud they have to walk through when it’s hammered it down with rain for most of the night. I don’t know how they manage it. As a teenager I would have considered starting school at 7:00 a.m. a kind of child abuse. Our students don’t finish early either. The ‘candidate’ class (who will be sitting their secondary school leaving exam in November) don’t go home until 6:00 p.m. and the other three forms leave at five! They don’t complain – they would all feel cheated if they had their school day reduced.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is a challenging thing to do. Every morning our students amaze me with their steadfast determination to make it to school and their belief that school still counts for something. When some minor inconvenience upsets my applecart I’m thankful that I’m living and working in a place where there are so many people who remind me how thankful I should be for each day. It doesn’t make me a perfect person, but it does keep me focused and determined to make their morning journey worthwhile. School should still count for something.