Chapter Seven: Leaving Kibogoji

Leaving Kibogoji did not happen all at once.

There was no announcement, no ceremony, no clear line drawn in the soil to mark the end. It arrived quietly, the way many endings do—through conversations held in low voices, through pauses that lasted a little too long, through the feeling that something familiar was slowly loosening its grip.

I spent four long years in Kibogoji.

Four years of rain and drought. Four years of hunger and survival. Four years of learning how to live with less and endure more.

It was in Kibogoji that I started primary school.

School was far—very far. Almost fifteen kilometers every day, a long walk there and back. We walked early in the morning, before the sun became cruel, and returned late, tired and dusty. Because the school was so far away, most days I never had lunch. I ate early in the morning before starting the walk, and then again only when I returned home in the evening. My body learned to function on absence. Hunger became part of the routine.

I went to school already knowing how to read and write. I had learned that during my hiatus years in Mabama. Words were familiar to me. Numbers made sense. Books did not intimidate me.

Most of the children at my school did not have that advantage.

They struggled. Kiswahili was difficult for them because Kinguu was the language of their lives—the language of home, play, discipline, and belonging. Kiswahili belonged to school and authority, not comfort. Letters came slowly. Words resisted them.

My first-grade teacher, Mr. Malepela, noticed.

He selected me to help other children learn how to read and write. I sat beside them, pointing at letters, sounding out words, repeating patiently. I became a helper before I ever became a learner.

And so, for the first two to three years of school, I did not really learn anything new.

I read all the books on my own—Kiswahili books, even English books. I knew basic arithmetic. Lessons passed over me without challenge. My days were filled with walking, hunger, and repetition, not growth.

By my fourth year at the school, my mother realized what was happening.

She saw that I was surviving, but not advancing. Enduring, but not learning. Kibogoji had taught me resilience, but it could not offer me the education that would stretch me further.

So she made a decision.

She arranged for me to be moved to a different school, far away in Mkindo. A school with smarter kids. With teachers who would challenge me. A place where learning would demand effort again.

That decision became my opening.

Leaving Kibogoji was no longer just about movement—it was about possibility.

By then, Kibogoji had shaped me. 
It had marked my body and my mind.

I knew its paths without thinking. I could tell time by the sun and seasons by smell. My feet understood the land. My ears understood the forest. Kinguu no longer sounded foreign. It sounded like home.

That was the hardest part.

Leaving meant more than moving away from a place. It meant stepping out of a life that had claimed me fully. A life where survival was shared, where hunger was communal, where belonging was earned not through words but through endurance.

I watched familiar faces become memories. Friends I had grown up running beside, eating beside, fearing beside. We did not say goodbye properly. Children rarely do. We assumed we would meet again, somewhere, somehow.

The morning I left, the valley looked the same. 
The mountains stood where they always had. 
The forest did not shift to acknowledge my departure.

That hurt.

I carried Kibogoji with me—not in possessions, because there were few—but in habits. I walked lightly. I ate carefully. I wasted nothing. Hunger had trained me too well.

Fear traveled with me too—not the fear of lions or drought, but the quieter one: the knowledge that stability is fragile.

But resilience traveled farther.

Kibogoji had not failed me. 
It had prepared me.

Leaving was not abandonment. 
It was graduation.

I did not escape Kibogoji. 
I carried it forward.

And when I stepped toward Mkindo, toward books and classrooms and challenge, I did so with a strength forged by rain and hunger, fear and endurance.

That was my way out. 
And it was the last lesson Kibogoji gave me.