Why 18-year-old Caleb won’t be sitting his KCSE

What you need to know:

  • Like most teenagers in his Kaptama neighbourhood of Mt Elgon, Caleb had heard of the effects illicit brews had on their consumers and had stayed off the drinking dens
  • But, probably nudged on by the trademark experimentation of the average teenage boy, he went for something even more lethal — methanol
  • He says he only swallowed two pints of the chemical, but those were a pint too many and the world started darkening on him, literally

On July 28, Caleb Kiprotich Tendet decided he had been too blue for a while and thus needed a quick fix in the form of an artificial high.

Like most teenagers in his Kaptama neighbourhood of Mt Elgon, Caleb had heard of the effects illicit brews had on their consumers and had stayed off the drinking dens.

But, probably nudged on by the trademark experimentation of the average teenage boy, he went for something even more lethal — methanol. He says he only swallowed two pints of the chemical, but those were a pint too many and the world started darkening on him, literally.

Six months later, Caleb is now a blind boy, and as Form Four students sit their Drawing and Design and Power Mechanics exams this morning, he will be hundreds of kilometres away from home at the Machakos Technical Institute for the Blind, where he is learning to cope with his blindness.

Caleb wanted to become an Accountant while schooling at Moi High School Kaptama, but today that dream is no more. It has been a tough six months learning to live without the gift of sight, but he has resigned himself to his fate and hopes to turn his life around by the time he steps out of Machakos Technical.

“I was good in Mathematics, Business Studies, History and languages,” he says, “and it was because of my good grades in maths that I decided maybe a career in accounts would do it for me.”

But it wasn’t just accountancy that kept him going. His mother Julia Kipkwon has struggled alone to fend for him since the death of their father in November 19, 2010, and Caleb saw attaining good grades in KCSE as a way of rewarding his mother.

“Now that’s all gone,” he regrets.

On the fateful day of July 28, Caleb was in the middle of district mock examinations when, he says, his school laboratory prefect brought him a bottle of methanol.

“I don’t know how he had managed to smuggle it out of the laboratory, but I remember how excited we were when he told us that the contents of the bottle were alcohol by any other name. I took two sips of the methanol, which tasted like a spirit. My friends joined in the fray as well, and I think those boys must have drank more of the stuff than I did,” he recalls.

Nothing dramatic happened after that other than the fleeting feeling of drunkenness associated with the chemical, but the next day brought with it the most tormenting chapter of the young man’s life.

“First I lost appetite, then I started feeling like vomiting,” he says.

“I went to the school nurse and was given some painkillers, but things didn’t improve. I rested at the dormitory waiting for relief throughout the day and night. We had a History and Biology exam the following day, but I felt to exhausted and sickly that I couldn’t even walk to class, so I missed the tests.

“In the afternoon of the third day I sought permission from the teacher on duty to go to hospital, but I was told I could not leave the school premises. I opted to go back to the dormitory. In the evening I took supper but vomited it all.

“Things got worse at night and I was rushed to the Kaptama Dispensary, where again I was given painkillers and told to report back in the morning.”

On his way back from the dispensary Caleb complained to his colleagues, who had accompanied him to hospital, that he could not see far. He could not even see the street lights that lined the way to school, he said.

By the time he was allowed to go home from school, the damage had already been done.

“At home, I was taken to a local dispensary, and it was here that I was told that I was totally blind,” he says, regret tingeing his voice.

What pains him even more is the fact that he could have regained his sight had he sought medical attention fast.

Doctors have told him that all he needed to do when he realised the methanol was taking a toll on his body was consume alcohol, which would have reversed the effects of the poison.

But by the time he got to hospital, his optical nerves had been rendered useless by the methanol.

Months later, he was referred to the Machakos Technical Institute for the Blind to start life anew.

“I am a victim of stupid things that boys and girls do in school,” he told us at the school, where he is slowly settling down to the rhythms of life surrounded by perpetual darkness.

“I am full of regret because I destroyed my hopes... my dreams and ambitions. It pains me that the exams are prepared for for so long are here and there is nothing I can do to reverse the situation.”