On setting foot on the gate of Jude girls high school, I never suspected that what I had envisioned as good opportunity and a chance to mould young proud, cheeky and giggly girls into responsible mothers and career women, would turn out to be an eerie adventure of dealing and dodging the dark powers! Trust you me, am not your typical preacher,im an ordinary guy who forgets to say his daily prayers in the comfort that my eve-r praying mum has got me covered on her many conversations with the Old Man upstairs.
So, having, had cleared my form four and passed with flying colours(PARDON THE CLICHÉ) and after fooling around going for computer classes in some ‘kiosk computer college’ guess its among the ones scabbed recently by ministry of education(boy, were you to see the proprietor who would answer the Motorola C118 phone and say, “director and the CEO smart kid computer college on line, how can I help you?”never mind was speaking to his village cronies!!i had learnt enough to graduate after one month and then I had the whole two years to fool to fool around before joining campus(pity those affected by the double intake program)they will not get enough time to be out of school and learn the ABC;s of hussling!the chaps will never go broke see? Direct from pocket money to the HELB loan! The lucky ba##$%^*&!!!!
So it’s over this period of that I decided to hustle by going to teach at some provincial girls high school that my nightmare begun..and nay,im not talking about the nightmare of a young man teaching some young girls locked in some far away boarding with raging adolescent hormones at their pick,im talking not about the several temptations you get accosted to, especially if you abode around the school compound, no it’s the nightmare of DEVIL WORSHIP!
Generally being a doubting Thomas and a very skeptic person, I thought that djinns don’t exist and up to today, I have never believed in,or that,witchcraft does exist,but for the djinns..Excuse me!!so, after my good old uncle dropped me at the school in his jalopy,(he would kill me for calling it that)but im least worried because a person who has shunned owning a mobile phone handset up to today because he thinks is a form of modern colonization has zero chances of accessing the internet to read this article!so,he took me round the school compound you would think he was the outgoing BOG chairman, but he being a daily dairy farmer, as we made rounds on the new job place for his nephew, all I could hear him exclaim from time to time as we made our rounds was “what a great cow over there!wow!what a togen goat,!goodness!,what nicely wooly merino,!goodness,what a bull,if only he could mate my jersy,,he would then shake his head so sadly and say,however they have miserably failed in controlling the soil erosion! all this time I pretended to be at par with him whereas the truth is that I least cared about the silly goats bleating foolishly in the nearby fields.all along I had better things to worry about like whether there was a club nearby where I would go to appreciate my body once in a while,whether there was a place where I would go to watch dstv and such other better things
Soon it was time to escort the old man(Said it was way past his milking hours or something to that effect)and all he said to me was ,”this is a nice place kid, you can even get to rear some grade cows or even get out of here with a wife!”so, in a crowd of smoke the fellow was gone and it was me to find my way round the compound without paying attention to the sleepy cows!!
First I went to the administration block where I found a short, bead-eyed man with kinky hair cleaning and handling copious amount of tea from a large plastic mug, guessed it was his territory now that the teachers seemed to be gone, I noticed the torn sofa sets and saw no t.v,the man was cleaning and on asking whether the principal was around he literary gnarled at me and in the dimly lit corridor, I thought of vampire,he told me that it was way past office hours in a very disinterested way and continued painting the floor reddish- brown in the name of cleaning. In no uncertain terms that I was now a “teacher” and he relaxed and welcomed me with the most rough handshake have ever got in history!
And so I enquired whether he would give me the key to my house, and he smiled in a weird way and told me that the house was not locked,what!and he directed me to the house and true to his word, the house was not locked but that was just the start of the problems, the mabati house I fond as we made rounds with my uncle and he had murmured that they might be for the calves or some feed stores were now my plot base,. later I learnt they were meant to host young turks,as the untrained teachers were refered to.in other words the civilized word for “kazi kwa vijana initiative”.or academic vijana wa mkono.
Nevertheless I was determined to make some bucks to avoid an outing or anything to keep a young man going so I never really minded.I thought that with time when I would be promoted and move to a better house, being ambitious to the point of hoping for a promotion without being trained.
I got inside the mabati houses;and true to the word of madam principal, the house had a bedroom, a tableroom,a bathroom, a kitchennete,and a visitors room. The house was so spacious and the room she said were there not a single room that lacked, albeit full of dust and ants infested wood and timber at every corner.i noticed the bed was just a part of bed cut from a double -Decker to form two very small beds one placed in my room and the other in the so called guest room. The beds were very small and squeaky making any future business impossible,!(no pun intended)my main concern was light and I had been promised that they would be fixed in due time which even up to today I understand is yet to come, seems like due time is within the limits of forever. After I had cleaned and settled in the house as I lay on my bed I realized that it was so quiet and eerie in the house not mentioning the pitch darkness which was now crawling in stealthly.i had to make some quick arrangements to get the candles or some form of light,im not cowardly but I just don’t get along too well with darkness. My efforts to get a candle from a nearby shop failed miserably and I had to survive that night.
The first night, I got some comfort in knowing that I had some neighbours,there were three young men, principals sons and they were quite well outgoing learnt that the next house belonged to the deputy’s son and the furthest belonged to a miss Gloria,.I was comforted in the spirit of group mentality for a while, was later to disapprove my self sense of security that night,. as I settled to sleep, I opened the door to the house and I swear I could feel some prodding eyes watching me from a place in the house. The crickets went silent for a moment and the dim illumination from my phone went off. There was the smell of evil in t he house and some kind of creepy wind blew at my hands as I fumbled to find my way inside the haunted house, I thought of calling the boys in the next house but I thought otherwise as I did not want them to think of me as cowardly. Lastly I got to the bed and that’s when the real nightmare begun
As I lay on my bed and tried to access the common networking site from my phone,facebook so that it could at least distract my thoughts for a while, I was in for a rude shock on realizing that there was no network coverage tried to play a game I loved but all maybe hands could do was shake and its so uncharacteristic of me to shake hands gave up on the phone and all the horror stories I had ever heard cold not stop haunting my brain, it was during that time, I remember to be precisely around 1236 AM that I felt my body go numb. I felt so tired and could not move my body felt something like two heavy drops of some fluid fall into my ear..almost directly inside my Eustachian tube (at least have not forgotten the biology lessons especially on body parts as I formatted my mind free of complex useless mathematical formulas)!i immediately moved my finger to touch it only for another more heavy and warmer drop to fall on my hand tried to use my phone to illuminate so as to give me light to access the fluid but the damned handset could not light yet the battery was fully charged, how strange thought as I smelled the drop of warm fluid to establish what it was. It smelled of fresh blood and some cheap spray common with some coastal Swahili women, all I remember from there is my drifting into sudden very deep sleep,I could see a dark figure approach me and laugh hysterically shouting “tumemueza,,ameshindwa!”it was a very wicked and far-fetched dry laugh that rebounced as a weird echo. The following morning I woke up so tired and confused, I was minus one blanket,(found it on the farthest corner of the room, and it smelt so stuffy,)I comforted myself in the thought that that was just a very bad nightmare which will never happen again and that I was probably suffering from very serious malaria,however,deep inside me.,I felt that something was not okay.
Being a naturally nosy person, that morning, as the classes had not fully commenced as the schools had just opened, I got to talk to some elderly and friendly watchman in a cunning way such that he could not understand that I was suggesting there was some evil spirits in the school and asked several other people about the history of the school and it was evident that something was amiss; the very old claimed that the school was built on a ground that was an ancient cemetery,others claimed that the school was built on a ground that was earmarked for building a morgue, it was however the confessions of a straight-talking female teacher that got my heart racing. She openly told me that the reason that the school was half empty, that is,to the point of having a whole four empty claasrooms,it was once a double streamed school, was the massive transfer of students and teachers alike because of constant attack by the djinns.she went ahead to claim that several girls got raped over that period of time. She continued to prob me about where I was sleeping and after telling her the house, she made me fear the more by her telling me,”utaona kile kitakutoa huko iwas once in that same house but you can’t understand till you get strangled….boy!, was I scared”
That same evening, I experienced more of the harassing and I felt so powerless at the presence of some gigantic force that could not stop hovering over me.i consulted the prayerful lady teacher(she was the Christian union patron and she told me that she had received the same kind of complaints from students and we would pray together, I informed another prayer worrior:my mum, but on a light note as I did not want to hurt her.
By now, I had become a daily prayer warrior and I could pray almost four times in a single day! But still I got harassed, I had started to socialize with students by then,.some,as expected had tried to get so close to me to the extent that they would go bragging to their friends that I was there boyfriend to be and once one girl got so dangerously close to me to the extent of sitting at the front of the class and winking at me I had to forward her to the headmistress to discourage the others, she was given some serious thrashing and threaten with expulsion and once I called her aside after that to warn her about coming to the staffroom at night alone while I was there(I had started to over stay in the staffroom at night as I feared going down to the haunted house, I just tried to ensure that by the time I got inside there I was so tired and fell asleep immediately)she grumbled n told “me,mr munene I conquered you since your first night in this compound!!we will still meet down there at your house.”i was so scared and I just left her there and walked away, I felt that for sure she wielded some kind of a weird power over me,I tried to share with my colleagues over evening cup of tea but I would not bring myself to say it.i later learnt that it was the same girl who would claim that once the teachers entered the classroom she would see them naked. She would also talk to invisible friends
It was during my secret investigation that I found out more about the girl and the funny things that would happen to her foes and those that tried to compete with her group of girlfriends. One girl who had reported her to the administration claimed to have almost been raped by unkowm people that night as she went back to the dorm after having gone to the loos,she heard foot steps rapidly following her and some giggles and once she started running she was chased and on reaching her bed, her night dress was torn to pieces and warned to scream not, all the time,the girl in question was awake and gossiping in a language nobody could not understand with her weird girl friends. Asking her why she had never reported the matter to the adminstration,she said she tried several time but eery time she neater d the office some invisible force would warn her not to try ikt
Every night when I would get inside the house, I would feel some intimidating powerful force hovering above me. But I continued to pray together with my friend the c.u teacher until the feeling stopped. It was a welcome relieve when I was requested to host another young turk,a certain mr.muturi straight from college.we got along immediately and especially because of his raunchy and lacy stories about the times he was a tout, and his college escapades with ladies from various tribes, save for his worst drinking habit to the extent of coming so high on some cheap brew and calling me, “let me tell you little brother,those girls are temptations, keep off them, and remember am older than you and most importantly,im qualified and trained teacher!!he would say proudly before staggering to the kitchen and trying to boil eggs on the meko gas cooker using my plastic jug.!!
It was however that night that however mr muturi woke up screaming”shindwe!ngai fafa!hamuniwezi nyinyi pepo mbaya and endless praise the lord Nesh!!that I almost died of fear and laughter at the same time. He confessed to me how for the last one week especially on nights he was not drunk, he would get terrorized by unseen forces was happy that at least the nightmare was being away from me for a while and on giving my version of story to mr muturi,he stared swearing that he would bring a good pastor who was his friend to anoint the room with holy oil, and were he not available, he would hung the largest bone from pork that anybody had ever seen in the house,see?its said that the devil and pork don’t get along(thats story for another day)
Though I have since left the school to further my studies (and I emphasize)not to be a teacher lest am posted there),I hear mr mutri has since left the school too, “refer to his anti-mututholic behavior, the thought of mr muturi who would not even go anywhere near the c.u door or even close eyes if not bow his head as we prayed for lunch, turning to an instant nighttime preacher doesn’t stop from leaving me in stitches,boy!he was casting the demons out in a manner pastor pius muiru would envy,!!!!
*Editors note
*Name of the school and those of people change to conceal identity because this is a story based on a real life experience.
