Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton Read Online Free PDF Page B

As soon as I let him go, Addison took off. He had learned to swallow some of his own medicine, and I was working toward being a warrior.
     
    ONE OF THE PROBLEMS the nomads have with school is that we move our villages and the cattle, but the school staysin one place. That means leaving the children behind. The first year, my village was near the school, and I was able to go home easily. In my second year, the missionaries built a dormitory and started a boarding school. My family could move wherever they wanted to, and I could stay in school.
    My mom used to visit sometimes. She’d bring me milk. The food at school wasn’t what I was used to, and there wasn’t much of it. We ate mostly corn and beans—yellow corn, from America. Once I counted mine: There were 75 pieces of corn and 15 beans—so little it barely covered the plate. I didn’t complain—I was grateful for the school and the missionaries—but I was a nomadic kid, raised on milk. So whenever my family was nearby, my mother would bring me some milk. Sometimes she’d walk 10 or 20 miles with it.
    I went to that school through the seventh grade. Every time school closed for the vacation, I had to find my way home. That was one of the hardest things: The village might be 5 miles away, or it might be 50. Sometimes I wouldn’t know exactly where my family was. I had to search for them. So I’d set out with some other boys from my area. Sometimes the school car would take us to a point on the road as close as it could to where we were going. Then we’d walk. Usually, therewould be plenty of people along the way, in villages and cattle camps. We could spend the night with any family. If we didn’t encounter any people, we’d find a cave or sleep in a tree. The longest it took me to find my own family was about two weeks.
    I’ll tell you a story about a journey home when I was about ten. At that time, our village was really far away from the school, near the northern border of Kenya. About 80 of us boarded a truck. Most of the students were from other clans, very few from my village. The truck took us to a place called Nolongoi. It’s not even a place, really. It’s just a big acacia tree by the road. The truck stopped, and we all got out. And home was still 40 miles ahead.
    With us were some older boys. They were almost in their 20s but were going to school late because their fathers were forced to send someone. Those boys were our leaders. And their families were even farther away than mine. First we would walk to my village, and then they would continue on to theirs—another 25 miles or so. And it was raining, so we were all pretty miserable.
    My suitcase was a plastic garbage bag. I had been given a real suitcase by the missionary women in school, but it had broken apart in the rain one day. So now I carried a plastic bag with the few clothes I had in it.
    So we started walking. The terrain was flat with acacia trees, small bushes, and a few rocks that increased as we went farther into the lowlands. The ground was muddy from all the rain, and the mist made it hard to see where we were going. We were hungry—so hungry. And then I was afraid, because all around us as we walked along were fresh elephant and buffalo tracks.
    All of a sudden, the older boys who were leading called, “ Shh! Stop! Everybody, get down!” So we all crouched down. There in front of us was a large herd of elephants—dozens. Something had alarmed them. They were scared and running in our direction. One of the older guys, Mogole, picked me up and put me on his back. He was two classes ahead of me, and big—probably six feet tall. When my mom brought milk to the school for me, she always brought some for him as well. He had become a good friend of mine. Someone in our group whistled. Elephants hate a whistle, and they shifted direction when they heard it. Then we got out of there.
    We all ran and hid in a cave because there was more to worry about than the elephants. From the