Múturú was a precious commodity at Karatina D.E.B Primary School. If you got it, you were either lucky, or the cook’s favourite. The cook, Maina, was a slender man who always wore gumboots. Múturú was a large potato, preferably uncut, served in ‘supro’ AKA githeri with a bucket load of soup. ‘Supro’ always had hard maize and my milk teeth were never up to the task. I spent more energy chewing than the calories I was getting from ‘supro’. My saving grace was the soup which I used to drown the barely chewed ‘supro’ down my throat. On the rare days when I found favour in Maina’s eyes, I savoured every moment I had with my large potato. Such was my lunchtime experience at Karatina D.E.B primary school.

It was not long before I switched to carrying lunch from home. In the early 2000s, the popular mode of transport for lunch was a plastic dish with a handle. Mine was blue. To top up, was a bottle, moulded into a rabbit’s face, to carry tea for break time. This was a complete food pack for the day. My favourite days were when my mother would back cake, and I would carry it to school with a pink dish. She would pack extra cake which I would pass on to my class teacher, Mrs. Múchori. Mothers are experts at diplomacy. Break time was a ‘sharing is caring’ moment. Outside class, whoever had carried snacks would have  a hive of kids surrounding them, begging for a piece of whatever they had carried. The seed of handout culture was planted in those moments.

Lunchtime would find the food in plastic dishes already cold. But that was not all. Because the food had been in a closed container since morning, it was often a little stale. Not bad, but a little bad. Right there in the edge of going bad. That happens to food packed while hot, and the it stays closed in an air tight container for hours. Eating food in this state was like immunization. Like stress testing for the stomach so that Nairobi street food found me ready in adulthood.

If ‘múturú’ was the highlight of my ‘supro’ days, leaving school after lunch to watch Chuck Norris on display screens in electronic stores was the cherry on the top. In those days, school for lower primary kids ended at lunchtime. Action movies and shows had me and boys my age on a choke-hold. A repeat of Chuck Norris would air on KBC, Friday if I recall correctly, around lunch hour. I would stop on a display screen to watch it because the walk home would eat up show time and I would miss it. I was so influenced by action that one time, I lit a match and threw it inside my father’s radio to see if it would explode. It didn’t, to my disappointment. On the contrary, it went quiet. When my father took it for repair, he came back with the matchstick in a clear plastic bad. Evidence for my crimes against the robots.

My experiments with fire did not end at the radio. If there is one thing boys and cats share in common, it is curiosity. One day after school, Sammy (a childhood friend) and I walked into a fire. I do not mean this metaphorically. We walked into fire and burnt our feet. It was a scorching hot day in January of 2002 when it happened. We were leaving school, walking on the road sides avoiding non-existent traffic like Nairobi matatus. Our spirits of adventure were high and we came upon a section that sold charcoal. There was no official route through that section but were determined to chart a path for our generation. We passed the last load of charcoal and walked right into a pile of hot ash. The charcoal vendors burned their waste there. It looked harmless, the ash. In fact, we did not realize we were in hot soup, until we were halfway in and the pile was deep enough for the ash to enter our shoes from the top.

‘Ng’ombe akivunjika guu malishoni hujikokota hadi zizin,’ said the wahenga. And kujikokota we did from that crime scene after several ‘ah!’ ‘uh!’ ‘ah!’ ‘uh!’ screams. We attempted to walk home, feet burning, tears flowing as we winced with every step. We finally gave up on a hill not too far away from home. The chosen one to die on. Some women passing by found us, and upon enquiring what the problem was, found a way to get us help and inform our parents. I still remember being taken to a clinic and watching as my skin was peeled off burnt socks leaving exposed insides. My mother, a nurse by profession, would nurse my wounds for a whole month. I did not go to school that month. I would run away to the toilet, more like crawl away, each time I heard her arrive in the evening to avoid the excruciating wound dressing routine.

I had barely recovered from my wounds when I ran into barbed wire and cut my leg during break time. That evening, my father walked into the house with a look of resignation. He was absolutely fed up. For context, before I burnt my feet, I had been sliced on my right foot by a bicycle wheel. This happened when me and other boys had been carried on a bicycle and I accidentally swung my feet into the moving wheel. So I had just recovered from this before the ash incident. I would go on to lose things, fall, run into walls and get a swollen forehead. Boyish misadventures that earned me the moniker ‘kifaru’ from my father for running into walls.

I hope all parents raising boys are having a good time.