Screenshots of my rather ordinary campus life.

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By Charity Kuria

 First-year experience: Trying to fit in the wrong cliques, disappointments, the hate, meeting the right and wrong friends. Being rejected and finally finding my own footing.

Second-year experience: I now feel grown up enough especially now that I live in a hostel off-campus. I have my own crib and can hit the door frame at own leisure without questions of:

"where were you?" 

"You want to access the school premises?"

"Where is your school ID?" 

"Write your name there and contacts. You will be contacted in the morning!”

You go to bed horrified of facing tomorrow and if you missed dinner then you are done for and will sleep hungry counting the miiterero. Ha!

I have finally discovered the school Canvas Newspaper, Journalism Club, Debate Club, Peer and Counselling Club, Environmental Club and other social gatherings, oh! and the school radio studio. This is nice!

Third year. By now I am holding several leadership positions in the above-mentioned clubs as the secretary in most of them. I love it though at times feel overwhelmed. By now I know or are acquaintances with half the population. My friends oftenly complain that I practically know everyone in school. I’ve made friends outside the school walls too. Plenty of them from Mama Mboga, the salon ladies, shopkeepers, matatu operators and even villagers.

On my second and third years I am mostly in every bus going outside the school gate. It doesn’t matter where, provided that I am inside and going somewhere. Sports activities, mentorship programs, clubs day out etc. They were my other majors and never mind that l don’t do any sport!

Fourth year. I now feel old in the school and can’t wait to get out and touch base with the working world albeit my head being filled with stories of how outside there sio mchezo. I want to head out and face that sio mchezo heads on.
Internship experience. Now I’ve finally brushed shoulders with sio mchezo and I must say it is better than being in class by a long-shot only that broke-ness seems to hit harder on this side of life. You meet different people and go to places that you previously travelled through tell-tales of people boasting how they held a function at Sarova Stanley last weekend.

I meet celebrities through interviews, visit places under assignments and encountered all that sio mchezo. Thing is, I was doing evening classes hence encountered night scene and given that I am not a rave person (I have never attended any rave in my miserable life.)

I have had my share of smoking weed and drinking but never in a rave only in the enclosed four walls of my crib or a friend’s house. Which is not fun if you asked the beasts-of- the- party and again that is history considering that I don't do that anymore.

Today l can even afford a firm NO while previously I swayed with the wind dancing to other people’s tunes. Is this where they say that “You’ve finally grown up?”

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