On top of all the problems we were facing during the dreadful teenage years, most of us were suffering from terminal gluttony. Because of this, we just didn’t see the sense in letting our mouths lie idle. We dug into our suitcases and we licked all the sugar and ate all the hard corn and drank all the juice. 

When it wasn’t enough, we made several trips to the canteen and emptied our pockets to stuff our mouths some more. We had a slogan for this piggishness: "Eat once and starve.”

Naturally, within a very short period (usually two weeks after reporting to school), we reeked of poverty. At this point in time the dormitory rats, those disloyal gold-diggers, would run away from us and head for the school farm. They were either afraid of starving or being our next meal.

This season of our lives was called ‘kayasi’.

I tried without success to find out the real meaning of the word ‘kayasi’. Nobody seemed to know. We all concurred that since the word sounded harsh and represented a very difficult time in boarding life, it meant famine and poverty.

On other days, we were fond of declaring our vegetarianism and thus refusing to eat if we found weevils clinging to beans. However during ‘kayasi’, hunger always liberated us from this kind of pomposity and we happily munched on the little and somewhat bitter tiny pieces of meat.

Whenever we finished glutting our bellies with this happy combination, we sat in our classrooms. We sat there taking turns to terrorize each other with different flavors of unpleasant gas from our stomachs.

On hot afternoons, the air was always thick and still, and consequently the smell of gas just lingered on, forcing us to flap our books lest we suffocate.

Eventually, we would get hungry again and sequential yawning would commence.

There was a day Clare Munini, a girl in my class, opened her mouth to yawn and she swallowed a housefly. The housefly looked healthy and would have made for a reasonable meal had she not hurled it out only seconds later. Yes, ‘kayasi’ always changed our perspective on things.

It paid to be a ‘believer’ during this trying time. For the fear of God, you were more likely to avoid the huge embarrassment that often accompanied the temptation of dipping your hand in another person’s suitcase.

At the same time, ‘kayasi’ always seemed to occur at a time when Christians were deliberately starving themselves to reflect on their lives and mend their relationship with God. Thus, if you had the strength of character, you could save face by pretending to fast.

If reputation meant nothing to you, you could become a ‘petite’. A ‘petite’ was a student who befriended a rich girl, did the rich girl’s chores and ran her errands in exchange for a few crumbs.

Originally, those girls were referred to as ‘elf’, but it was later decided that ‘petite’ was less insulting. Who were we to look down on someone who was just trying to make it out of ‘kayasi’ unscathed?