×
The Standard Group Plc is a multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key influence in matters of national and international interest.
  • Standard Group Plc HQ Office,
  • The Standard Group Center,Mombasa Road.
  • P.O Box 30080-00100,Nairobi, Kenya.
  • Telephone number: 0203222111, 0719012111
  • Email: [email protected]

Thank God the holidays are over

The festive season is over. Following Twelfth Night, the decorations have been taken down, the last drop of Christmas Amarula has been drunk, and we're all back in Nairobi after a few weeks of trying to get our spoilt, middle-class Kenyan children to bond with rural grandma and her collection of scrawny, naked-necked chickens and mangy, mongrel dogs.

Expatriate parents might take their children abroad to Rome or Austria for the festive period, where they'll be exposed to the joys of opera or polite waltzes after strolling down the promenades of old Europe. Or else, they hire an entire ten thousand-acre conservancy so that their only child can commune with lions and butterflies following bush breakfasts, balloon rides and horse treks over rocky outcrops that the white community has named 'Oxford Promontory', 'Islington's Nose', or something like that.

The Kenyan parent has other 'plans' for his/her ten children, however. Poorer rural parents might expect their children to help with livestock over the school break or to plant crops because these long holidays coincide, as they should, with the rains. The failing rains.

Middle-class urban parents, however, have to find other ways to keep their children occupied or, as we should perhaps properly say, 'out of their hair'. Ask any teacher from a reasonably affluent boarding school, and s/he'll tell you that the Kenyan parent is always asking for extra (illegal) holiday tuition or other ways to keep their child in school, away from home.

The prime skill that Kenyan parents learn is, one Kenyan parent once told me, 'How to defer the responsibilities of parenting until such time as your child, who you haven't come to know and haven't moulded, is old enough to leave home'.

This seemed a little cynical to me; and certainly this expatriate has met countless brilliant Kenyan parents and a number of quite aloof expatriate ones. But there we are.

Perhaps the most common 'parental' ways of keeping schoolchildren occupied over the recently-concluded holidays are: a) the in-home tutor; b) the 'Christian' camp.

The former is clear: mummy or daddy phone some random chap who's claiming to be 'qualified', and whose advert was found nailed to a tree on the estate. This supposed 'teacher' arrives with no papers and a shabby suit, and the parents decided instantly to trust him with teaching Form Four physics to their child.

In fact, they just want another adult in the house while they're at work, to act as chaperone so that little Derrick doesn't sleep with the housemaid. Slipped a few shillings in the parents' absence, the supposed tutor will at the very least let Derrick play on his computer all day, instead of studying.

And those 'Christian' camps run by goodness knows which 'youth group'? Well, we all know that they're really orgiastic parties held at a safe distance from mummy and daddy. True, these camps might have opening and closing prayers, but the holiest spirit is sometimes Jameson's Whisky.

School holidays are a tricky business.

[email protected]

Related Topics


.

Popular this week

.

Latest Articles