In the month of June, the rain would halt and the sun would come out. It would come out like a convict on a vengeance spree after an escape. And we earthlings were the subject of its wrath.

It was mercilessly hot, causing our body fats to melt. Well, the truth is that some of us needed the fat loss. Still, the sun should have been kind enough to be selective of which parts to melt.

For instance, Agnes was fond of shaving off her eyebrows and then drawing them back on with pencil. I guess she couldn’t accept that God had given her boring and shabby strands of hair for eyebrows yet she wanted neat lines that were long enough to meet her ears on either side.

In the heat of the sun, her drawn-on eyebrows would flow down her face like a black river, leaving her looking eternally surprised. She left a lot of unnecessary confusion in her path.

It was also in heat of June that we realised, for the very first time, that Amanda’s real skin colour was dark blue as opposed to brick red. This discovery was highly unnecessary. We had always thought that God changed his mind about her skin colour only after creating her face.

We should have found relief in water. But by the second day of June, the taps looked much thirstier than we did.

We were skeptical about drinking water boiled by the cooks. Someone had made a joke about the rusty colour of the water being a product of the cooks’ sweat. It was hard to swallow without imagining that you were digesting someone’s bodily fluids.

To get water for bathing, we had to walk down the hill to the borehole. Few people came back up the hill unscathed. There was slapping, scratching, biting, pulling of hair and threats of death and witchcraft.

Because water was scarce and therefore had to be used sparingly, no one could afford the luxury of wearing uniform only once before washing it.

In the afternoons, the old sweat in the shirts, skirts and shoes mixed with the new sweat. Since the air was still, the resultant stench just hung around the classroom. It tortured us into sleep, regurgitation and unconsciousness.

By mid-June, the mood was tense. The already irritable teenagers could be pushed into a strike at the slightest provocation. The school administration knew this. They also knew that they couldn’t control the weather.

So instead, they organized for conferences. Together with the chapel committee, they would come up a theme.

Themes always revolved around love and repentance.

Once the preachers arrived, they would heal those whose ancestors bestowed on them the ‘spirit of anger.’ They would walk around praying to rid the school of"demons of hatred that had been sitting on people’s shoulders following them around all day long.”

We would go back to God in tears, promising to go forth and sin no more. Calmness would be restored. That was until the following year when the ruin of June would come to bite us in the behind again.