Bureaucrats!

L, our homehelp, apologetically asked for another day off tomorrow, to take her adoptive daughter back to high school.  'That's fine, but I thought she went yesterday?'
'She did go yesterday, with my (grown-up) daughter, but she got there an hour too late, so they sent her back home again, and told her to come back two days later, with her guardian this time.'

Places at high school are centrally allocated to those who pass the exam. Pupils can end up at school at the other end of Kenya. Fortunately, L's daughter's school is in Ruiru, only 45 minutes away if you had a car and took the short cuts. Unfortunately however, the matatu route goes along the Thika Road, site of a monumental, six lane Chinese superhighway road-building programme. This is not a route for newcomers to Kenya, or for anxious maiden aunts. It's Kenyan driving squared, as articulated lorries go off-road up very steep unmade roads, undertake, overtake, drive the wrong way up the highway, to try to recover some time lost during the go-slow. 

L's daughter had set off from Eastleigh, Nairobi at midday. She had to get to school for 4pm, but didn't arrive till 5pm.  And so they looked at their watches, said 'You should have been here at 4,' and sent her home again.  It's not her first term. She's a minor. It left her travelling back down the Thika Road after dark, arriving in Eastleigh when it really wasn't safe.  What of the time at school she's missing while they indulge in this powerplay?  And it wasted a return matatu fare, no small consideration either.

An American friend fumed last term at her experiences trying to deliver her homehelp's son to a nearby Nairobi high school.  Kindly, she had offered him, and his trunk a lift. She had already forked out for a bed (first formers should bring their own bed) and for several bits of additional clothing. He, she, and the trunk got turned away on his first day by the headteacher, because he didn't have any pyjamas in his trunk (too expensive) and he'd been unable to find a ream of photocopy paper (bring your own photocopy paper for any handouts during the term). What IS this, she ranted, is it because I'm a foreigner?  No, I now realise, nothing to do with being a foreigner, this is how Kenyan pupils and their parents get treated.

To me it doesn't make any sense at all. You can't begin to afford the school fees for high school if you don't have a job. We pay 80% of L's schoolfees. And yet here the school is, demanding that the parent of a re-enrolling child who actually turned up, with the schoolfees in hand, turns up again, cap in hand, taking a day off work, just because you want to enforce a punctuality rule. Pah pah pah. (Not that I have anything at all against incentives for punctuality as a general rule here.)

But again, this outrage is a foreigner's luxury. L isn't outraged, rather more, resigned. She doesn't seem to expect a system which respects her as a wage-earner, as a client, as a stakeholder. How frustrating must it be that I, at third hand, feel entitled to my outrage, while for her, this is just one more inadequate system to shoulder.