The cruelties of youth..
"Imagine being given a matchbox and being asked to cut grass to the exact dimensions of the box, and not with a razor blade, but with our huge machetes.." Nkem (African Shirts) tells a human-lawnmower story from his boarding-school days. Read here.
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5 comments:
This surely brings back memories of my secondary school days in Nigeria. Our boarding school owned so much land everyone had a 'Permanent portion' i.e a piece of land they were responsible for(clearing and tending).
My toilet washing skills from school came in handy when I worked as a cleaner in my first few weeks in the UK... and I still weed my back garden regularly.
Having said that I think it was a nasty experience and I wouldn't want my kids to go through that....
This surely brings back memories of my secondary school days in Nigeria. Our boarding school owned so much land everyone had a 'Permanent portion' i.e a piece of land they were responsible for(clearing and tending).
My toilet washing skills from school came in handy when I worked as a cleaner in my first few weeks in the UK... and I still weed my back garden regularly.
Having said that I think it was a nasty experience and I wouldn't want my kids to go through that....
Cutting grass was also part of boarding school life and experience especially if the school premises was on the edge of a forest like mine (RSS) was.
But then we had slang for that, it was called "mass attack", in fact, the large machetes were useless, you needed something called a cutlass which was like a one-handed scythe.
Then when power lines ran past the back of our school, we got to uprooting tree stumps.
In both cases, we ajebotas never got to finish our allotments.
I covered some of those topics in my write-up celebrating the 60th anniversary of my secondary school.
Sounds just like my school days: the headmaster there was particularly fond of tree stumps though. You got a machete and you had to dig them out. Period. These were always a long term project - say 8 hours a day for a week to three weeks depending on how much you were willing to get into it - and never fun.
I do not miss those days.
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