St Teresa’s School, Eastleigh
By
Kersi Rustomji
After a week of idling
about in Nairobi, dad took us to the
Catholic Parochial School on the eastern edge of the capital Nairobi, at the
rear of the main post office. A rather severe-looking nun Mother Gertrude, who
did turn out to be very kali, strict,
interviewed us. At the end of it she asked dad, ‘And will the boys be learning
scriptures too Mr Rustomji.’ ‘Oh, indeed Mother indeed. They are to know all about
good Lord Jesus and all, but you are not to convert them into Christians,’ he
replied.
Mother Gertrude and
Mother Stanislaw, together with lay teachers, all ladies, ran the school. Once
more I made new friends and enjoyed school, except for one reason. Whenever
during scripture lessons I asked the question to which the teacher had no
convincing answer, I contested the matter. Invariably I was sent off to the
resident priest, whose solution to the problem was to crack my hand with a
thick round ebony stick. This went on for a long time and in fact, I had an
injury to the bone below my thumb.
Finally, when I was once
more shunted to the priest's office, I stood at his desk stuck out my hand and
said to him, ‘Father, you know that this is not going to stop me asking the
questions.’ He looked at me for a few moments, rose from his chair and replied,
‘Oh, begone from here, Kersi. I too am tired of hitting you.’ There was no more
punishment after this and I too ceased asking too many questions, for I came to
realize that there would never be really satisfying answers.
 |
| Not much has changed from the first time Kersi and I saw the gleaming St Teresa's Girls School in the early 1950s |
Later the school moved
from the city centre to St. Teresa's School in Eastleigh, which had a very large
vacant playing field. It was not long before I got the boys to dig out and make
a cricket pitch in the black cotton soil. I then went to a local Punjabi
contractor and got him to drop us a truckload of marram. We filled the dug-out
pitch with it then compacted it with a large hand roller he had also
loaned.
We now needed all the
playing gear and if possible, a mat and I worked out a plan. I obtained a
letter from Mother Stanislaw, which stated that we the kids were keen on
cricket and had already dug and made a pitch and that we now needed rest of the
gear. Making copies, we approached sports stores and clubs. As I knew Jehangir
Jabbar the well known Nairobi Gymkhana cricketer and manager of the club I
first approached him.
To my greatest surprise,
he gi\ave us several old but usable bats, balls, stumps, gloves, a few pads but
also an old but good mat. And the mat proved to be the problem. We had to find
a truck to carry the huge full-length mat to the school and my Punjabi
contractor friend was not able to help, as his truck was very busy. We were
stumped, as we did not have funds to hire a truck. Then one morning a solution
appeared.
Every morning a Goan
parent came in an army truck to drop his kids to school. We talked about
approaching him and one morning I went up to him and explained our problem to
him. He said that he had seen us work on the pitch
and he would let us know the next morning. In the morning, we formed a cluster
near the gate to meet him. He called us over and said that he could get the
truck at three in the afternoon and bring the mat over. We cheered and ran off
to tell Mother Stanislaw and she said that we could store the mat in the boys
drinking room.
A month from the
day we had started we played our first game between two teams picked from the
school. From it we later picked a school XI and played other schools in the
area; yes I was elected the skipper.
Kwaheri bwana...
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