Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton Read Online Free PDF Page A

Christianity and other Western ways of thinking. Lmatarion, who was about 11 years old, was placed in the first grade.
    Right from the beginning, he couldn’t stand it. He went to school for one day, and on the second day he ran away with a group of other boys. They all went in different directions. Lmatarion hid in a hyena’s hole. He later said, “I’d rather be eaten by hyenas than go to school,” but fortunately the hyenas had moved out. He stayed in the hole for three days. Finally, the villagers and police found him and brought him home. The police said to my father, “Well, you’re not off the hook, you still have to send one.”
    I’d been paying attention to what was going on, and I said, “I’m here!”
    “How old are you?” they asked.
    “Eight.” Actually, I was only about six. You had to be eight to go to school, but I was very quick talking, and there was no way for the police to know how old I was because we didn’t have birth certificates or any other document that recorded when I was born.
    The way the government people reckoned a child’s age was to ask him to lift his arm, reach over the top of his head, and touch his opposite ear. A small child can’t do that: His arms are too short. So they asked me, “Touch!” and I stretched, put everything into it, and just about reached—or at least got close enough to satisfy the police. It solved a problem for them and for my father and my brothers.
    I wanted to go to school. At that time, I was very heavy and the kids picked on me. I was tired of it and eager for any change. So the next day, off I went. When I got there, the American woman who ran the school looked at me and asked, “How old are you?”
    I said, “Eight.”
    She said, “Touch!” and again I reached, really put everything into it. I convinced her, too. Then she gave me a piece of candy. I’d never had candy before. It was so sweet, so good. From then on, she gave me a candy every day. Sometimes I went to her door very early inthe morning and waited for the candy. It was like magic. I stayed and never left.
     
    I WAS PUT right into first grade. The school was very simple. There were no chairs, no desks. The teacher had a blackboard, and we sat on the ground. The school day was long, starting at seven in the morning and running until four or five in the afternoon.
    We learned the same things in school that children learn all over the world—reading, writing, arithmetic. At first we didn’t have paper and pencil, so we learned to write with a stick in the dirt floor of the school.
    Another thing we learned was the Bible. I got to know the Old and New Testaments very well, and I learned a lot of Christian values from the missionaries at that school. I still follow those values.
    School was so different from life in the village and the cattle camp. The first thing we were told when we arrived was to take off our traditional clothes—our nanga and beads. The missionaries supplied us with uniforms instead: shorts, a shirt, shoes, sometimes a jacket. And I was baptized at the school, which is how I got the name Joseph. But when I went home during the holidays, I changed back into my traditional dress, put on my beads, painted my body. For one thing, the otherkids would have teased me if I hadn’t. But even at that age, I didn’t want to be set too far apart from my culture. I wanted to learn, but I wanted to remain part of the tradition I’d grown up in.
    School was tough. The teachers expected a lot from you. They expected you to pay attention and work hard, and to sit still and not cause trouble. It didn’t help that I was overweight. The kids at school were just as bad as the village kids. They called me “Kimbo,” which is the name of a brand of cooking oil sold in East Africa. It was like being called “Crisco” in the United States. When kids picked on me, I fought back, so I was always in trouble.
    A part of every school day was set aside for punishing