For Form 1, my parents enrolled me in a school in the rural area, about three hours from home, near Mount Kenya.
I did not like that school.
Let me be precise about what I did not like, because it was not what you might assume. It was a boarding school, and the boarding part was fine. I had expected boarding school for high school. I had wanted boarding school. The independence of it appealed to me.
What I had not expected was everything else.
The weather, for one, was mostly cold. Mount Kenya does not apologise for this.
But the cold I could handle. The harder thing was subtler: I did not fit, and everyone could tell.
I was from Nairobi. Most of the other girls were from the surrounding area. They spoke the local language, which I knew well enough to mostly understand, but not well enough to speak with any eloquence. So I defaulted to English, because English was where my words lived.
They read that as pride.
I understand why. From the outside, a Nairobi girl who responds in English to things said in the mother tongue looks like a girl making a statement. But I was not making a statement. I was just a 13-year-old trying to communicate in the language where I could actually be myself.
The teachers had their own version of the same assumption. A girl from Nairobi, they seemed to expect, would be trouble. City behaviour. Bad influence. They watched me for it.
Here is the funny part: I was a good girl. Deeply, boringly good. I was excellent at keeping rules. There was no rebellion coming. But it did not matter, because they were not responding to who I was. They were responding to who they assumed someone like me would be.
Also, my things kept getting stolen. That did not help.
After one term, I convinced my parents to move me.
I landed at Loreto Convent Msongari in Nairobi, a day school this time, and I am so glad I did, because that school gave me my life.
Msongari is where I performed in Pirates of Penzance. It is where I met a teacher I will never forget: a nun from Ireland who taught me music and the piano. She was a wonderful teacher, and she did something for me that had nothing to do with scales or sight-reading: she spoke words of encouragement over me, constantly. She told me I would be successful in life. When you are a quiet girl who has just come from a school where people assumed the worst of you, a teacher who assumes the best of you is not a small thing. It is water in dry soil.
I played tennis. I played hockey. I did Science Congress and made it all the way to nationals. I climbed Mount Kenya, yes, the same mountain that had loomed cold over my miserable first term, except this time on my own terms, as an adventure rather than a sentence.
I did all of that and still excelled academically. Not despite the activities. I suspect, in part, because of them. All of that making and doing and building shaped the woman I became far more than any single exam did.
Here is the lesson I take from those two schools, and it is one I carry into every room I lead in today:
The same person, in two different environments, produced two completely different stories. At the first school I was “the proud Nairobi girl,” misread, mistrusted, watched for failures I was never going to commit. At the second, I was a musician, an athlete, a scientist, a climber of mountains.
I did not change. The environment did.
People rarely experience the same situation the same way, and people rarely get read the same way in different places. The girls at that first school were not cruel; they interpreted me through the only lens they had. The teachers were not villains; they were running on assumptions. And I was not proud; I was just out of place.
It takes different strokes to build the world. But it also takes the right soil for each particular seed. Part of my job now, as a leader, as a mother, as a person, is remembering that when someone is struggling, the first question is not always “what is wrong with them?”
Sometimes it is: “what does this environment make impossible for them?”
Come back tomorrow for Day 45: the family that made me.
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