Read Online And Then Life Happens by Auma Obama - Free Book Online Page A

no one could stop us from becoming whatever we had set our mind to. And that really was the case. To this day, over thirty years later, I run into alumnae of “Boma”—as we fondly called our school ( boma means “cattle pen” in the Maasai language)—who have since become scientists, engineers, lawyers, judges, professors, or politicians. Most former students go through life with a confidence that can certainly be traced back to their Boma education.
    While during the week a packed academic and extracurricular schedule provided me with the necessary distraction from the pain smoldering inside me, on some weekends the emotions kept in check in the midst of the school routine rose powerfully to the surface. This happened most often when we girls dealt with typically female questions, which a mother would have been best equipped to answer. Such topics usually came up on Saturday evenings after dinner—because we were free to do what we wanted with those evenings. In the common rooms of the several residence halls, we could play records and dance and visit each other in our respective living quarters.
    In a group of friends, we moved from one residence hall to another, usually boisterous and laughing loudly. We stayed longest where songs were played that we knew by heart and could sing along to at the top of our voices. In that joyful atmosphere, I was sometimes seized unexpectedly by a profound sadness. My friends struck me as so happy and carefree; their only concern seemed to be the choice of a common room with the best dance music. But I sank deeper and deeper into a feeling of loneliness, which threatened to nearly suffocate me. On such evenings, I withdrew from the group of friends unnoticed, in order to be alone. I crept over to the “Five Acre,” an elevated semicircular stretch of land that separated the residence halls, each of which housed about a hundred students, from the academic buildings. There I sat in the dark for hours on a bench, from which I watched all the girls walking back and forth between the various residence halls. The bench was under a large tree directly in front of the residence hall in which I was living.
    I spent many Saturday evenings in that familiar place. Sometimes I only wept softly, but often my emotions rumbled fiercely in me, and I stared angrily into space. I felt betrayed by my father, blaming him for not holding the family together, and abandoned by my stepmother. If the separation only applied to my father, then where was she now? I asked myself, furiously hurling the words into the darkness. My father had promised me that everything would turn out all right, after I had asked him for the hundredth time what was going to happen now that they had left. But everything was not all right! Why else was I so unhappy? And why hadn’t my stepmother been in touch with me at all?
    One evening, I almost cried my heart out on my favorite bench. I had been sitting with a few friends, and our chat had turned to the problem of eyebrow plucking. Should we or shouldn’t we? Was plucking your eyebrows part of becoming a woman? Suggestions, considerations, and arguments went back and forth, but we did not reach a clear conclusion. Actually, none of us really knew at that point what it meant to be a woman. Even though I was looking forward to it, I was at the same time afraid of it, as many other girls must have been as well. One of my schoolmates finally suggested that we ask our mothers what they had to say on the topic. Everyone nodded enthusiastically, and I nodded, too—knowing all the while that there was no mother I could ask. I barely held back the tears. Shortly thereafter, I stole away and visited my spot under the tree. And there I longed desperately for the mother who would have been able to advise me on the difficult question of eyebrow plucking, among other things.
    *   *   *
    Even more difficult for me than those Saturday