Off to School...for eighteen weeks!

IN JANUARY 1956 at the tender age of 6 1/2 years I left home for boarding school where I would spend more time than at home for the next six years. For a year my mother had been home schooling me with the help of the Federal Broadcasting Corporation (Federation of Rhodesia and Nysasland) and its weekly 'School On The Air" program. Now I was to travel to the other side of Northern Rhodesia to attend a real school. Sakeji School had been started by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Fisher in 1925 as a school for the children of missionaries. My parents had decided to enroll me to enable me to receive a comptetive education which I would not receive at the local mission school with its limited resources. It would also provide a safe and healthy spiritual environment for the care of my soul.

For weeks leading up to my departure my mother was getting things ready for my new adventure. Every piece of clothing (the school had sent a precise list of how many of what items I needed to have) had to be labeled with my name. Mum had ordered small cloth name tags and hand sewed one on each item - an endless task it seemed. Everything was packed into a metal trunk and the day arrived for Dad and me to depart.

We traveled, probably in our family's Bedford Dormobile, to Elizabethville in the southwestern part of neighboring Belgian Congo where we were to meet up with several other families and as a group take the train across southern Congo to Mutshatsha where a vehicle from the school would meet us for the final 50 miles or so of the journey.

In Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) we stayed at Rest-a-While, a missionary guest house run by Mr. and Mrs. Rew. I recall on that evening that before tucking me into bed my father read to me Psalm 46 which begins:

1God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. 2Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; 3Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

and ends:

10Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. 11The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

While those might seem rather weighty words for a six-year-old they have stayed with me all these years.

The next day we boarded the train with all the other children and a few parents for the day and night journey across southern Congo. There were six bunks in each cabin - three on either side. The middle bunk was not for claustrophobes - there was hardly enough space to turn over. We arrived in the copper mining city of Kolwezi during the middle of the night where a different engine was hitched to the train as the train was split in two parts, ours to keep moving west and the other to head north (Congo is the twelfth largest country in the world by area). There was great excitement as we felt the bumps of being shunted around.

Arriving in Mutshatsha in the early morning we were met by local missionaries who advised that the Sakeji diesel lorry (truck) was not able to meet us because a major bridge along the road had been washed out by heavy rains. The missionaries took us to the washed out bridge over the Mukolwezi River where a very rickety walking bridge had been constructed across the rapidly flowing river. I took my father's hand as he guided me across to safety on the other side and we climbed into the back of the Sakeji diesel for the rest of the journey.

The time soon came for Dad to head home. He told me later that I simply said goodbye and went off to admire Mr. Searle's red Chevy pick-up truck. I don't believe I had any idea what I was in for. In August it was my mother's turn to take me for my second term. We followed the same route, this time riding to Elizabethville with Jenny Mottram of Cibambo Mission in her Willys Jeep. I was stuck in the back where I froze in the early morning hours of that cold season day; I eventually convinced my mother to let me squeeze in the cab with her. When we eventually got to Sakeji I was well aware of what the next eighteen weeks entailed and I cried my heart out when my mother was to leave, making quite a scene for her in front of the other students and parents just as we were sitting down for dinner. But I eventually adjusted and made it through the next five-and-a-half years.

(c)2008 roy kruse