Journey to the future has just begun

• New Form One girls determined to trudge on amid confusion and home-sickness

Barely a week after 14-year-old Immaculate Wanjeri reported to Form One, she wants to return home.

The girl, known to friends as Imma, reported to Mary Hill Girls High School near Thika, last week but she is already feeling home sick. “I miss home,” she says.

Mary Hill principal Imelda Barasa understands only too well why Immaculate has the feeling, a short time after reporting.

“It’s normal. Especially for girls from day schools, it is their first time in a boarding school,” she says.

“But we have a system of taking care of the situation and she will be quite comfortable in class in a few days,” she says.

The long trip

That is now becoming the other side of a story she started on Tuesday last week as she prepared to make the long trip to the national school.

That night, she packed her tin box, ready to take the first bus out of Nyahururu Town, to Nairobi, more than 200km away.

There she picked another vehicle to take her to Mary Hill, 50km from Nairobi.

The last time she travelled such a long distance, Immaculate was seven years old, on a school trip to Nairobi. But this time, the journey was longer. Unlike the one-day school trip, Immaculate was setting off on a four-year trip through high school.

And on reaching the gates of Mary Hill, her excitement changed to anxiety. The school was big, she says, many times bigger than her former school, Mt Angels Primary in Nyahururu. Everything around her was new; the teachers, students and even the school routine.

At Mary Hill, the alarm goes off at 4.30am, and the new student is still getting used to the loud ring, and the girls’ mad scramble to get ready for mandatory morning preps at 5.10am.

“It is so confusing; I was used to waking up later and walking to school,” she told the Daily Nation team.

But the new school routine is not as hard to get used to as the new sense of responsibility growing on the young student’s shoulders.

She is among thousands of new students reporting to Form One.