LIFE BY LOUIS: Of relatives who insist on attending Graduation Day

Most institutions of higher learning hold their graduation ceremonies towards the end of the year.

If you are a student at a prestigious public university located inside the city centre and you really love your parents, please don't bring them to Nairobi for your graduation ceremony.

If you wish to see them grow old and enjoy the fruits of your first salary, keep them away from the hustle and bustle of the big city on your graduation day.

Whenever I remember my graduation day experience, a cold shiver runs down my back. Despite having invited the entire village along with other uninvited guests for the graduation ceremony, we never made it to the graduation square.

I suppose even to this date I don’t have the "power to read and write" that was granted by the Main Chancellor of the university.

LASTING LESSON

If you have that one nosy neighbour that always comes to your home every morning to borrow salt and the visit always coincides with your breakfast, I have a remedy for that.

For that troublesome aunt who always asks you in public when you will marry, I have just the right solution for that too.

And that nuisance of an uncle who is always stealing small inches of your land boundary and falsely claiming that your goats have eaten his maize, I will give you a silencer for his big mouth: Your graduation day is the right time to teach these enemies a lasting lesson.

In fact, the graduation ceremony experience is best reserved for your enemies; those whom you wish to see experiencing great suffering and pain.

TRAFFIC JAM

To ensure that they don’t miss what you have in store for them, you should inform them of your impending graduation well in advance.

Arrange for their transport to the graduation venue. You could even hire the old village pickup that ferries livestock and farm produce to the market.

Next, to throw them off track, tell them that the graduation ceremony kicks off at midday so that they leave the village at 11am.

Being the busy day that it is, they will encounter inbound traffic at Kasarani while using the Thika Superhighway. They will arrive in town at 1.30pm when the “power to read and write” has already been granted to you.

For the sake of retaining memories of the day, you will offer to take them round the empty graduation square as they take photos and pose by the ‘fountain of knowledge’.

LUNCH OFFER

Since they are hungry and the ceremony is over anyway, you will offer to buy them lunch at a popular eatery near Athi River.

By the time you wiggle yourselves out of the city centre , get onto Mombasa Road in order to reach the eatery, it will be 4pm.

The eatery will have already closed down as it gets converted back into a church in preparation for the weekend worship services.
Out of your benevolence, you will take them to the supermarket and buy them soda and cake. After the sumptuous lunch, you will advise their driver to take the Eastern Bypass route back home.

However, you know very well that traffic jam along the bypass starts as soon as you join it. By the time they emerge at the Superhighway again it is well past 9pm. Fortunately, they do not know this. You will part ways to meet back at home.

Hopefully, it shall be raining cats and dogs, and they will end up drenched in the leaking old pick-up. They will arrive back in your village well past midnight when the reception party is over and the utensils have been cleaned and the tent folded back.

LESSON LEARNT

The experience of missing both the graduation ceremony and the reception party, not to mention the great suffering endured that day, will remain forever in their minds.

You can be sure that they will have a story in future for anyone who insists on travelling to Nairobi for a graduation ceremony.

More importantly, they will have learnt a lesson that will hopefully make them change from their annoying ways, once and for all.