My first day at school. I repeated the words slowly to myself, wondering exactly what it meant while staring at the foolscap sheet on my desk.

Could it be the first day I started schooling as a child, or my first day in their school? It could not be the latter. I was trying to gain admission into their school, how could they ask me to write about my first day in a school I hadn’t started?

“Thirty minutes. You have just thirty minutes.” The tall man instructed.

He must be an old teacher here. He sounded like the school belonged to him.

The time was short. I must think fast. I swallowed hard.

With my pencil I put down a few thoughts on the question paper. No room for mistakes once I start writing with the pen. My palms were sweaty.

“My God! What is this?” I muttered in displeasure.

When I’m clueless about a topic, I write nonsense. I hoped what I was about to write was sense.

Ten minutes must have gone by. Twenty to go. The dilemma was settled. My first time in school as a child it shall be.

I get to work, writing frantically as if dictated to by a ghost. I recounted how one cloudy Wednesday morning after breakfast Grandma took my hand as we walked across fields of herdsmen and grazing cattle, how we sat in a canoe, crossed a river, the beautiful countryside scenery, and queues six-year olds had to form on a school compound. How each child was asked to stretch a hand across the head to reach the other ear and how those who succeeded were admitted into kindergarten.

How disappointed I was as grandma and other sad parents whose children too were not admitted, looked on.

I intended writing a one-page essay. Now it had ballooned into a two-and-half page tale. Normally, I should be happy and proud of myself. But I couldn’t. As I looked over the work, correcting one or two things, something in me told me what I wrote was rubbish.

The tall man abruptly ended a conversation with another teacher who stood at a window of the room in which we sat.

“Stop work now!” he ordered as he turned to face us now.

Reluctantly, I handed my paper. Other candidates in the hall seemed confident they had nailed it.

I wondered how my siblings fared in their tests. They were in a different room.

While I waited, I scanned the new school. It looked simple. I expected something better considering the fact that it was a school in the city. The capital city of the country. All the same, it was better than the wooden classrooms we sat in back home.

I spotted a few girls. They looked pretty. City girls.

Here, it seemed they had one headmaster for the primary and junior high sections. Our former school had two, one for each section.

My thoughts were suddenly disrupted by a siren. It must be breaktime. Or, the end of a lesson. I wasn’t sure. I craned my neck to look outside. Didn’t see anyone coming out. It took a while before students came out one by one.

These students were different. In my former school, we rushed out rowdily like freed prisoners whenever it was breaktime. I had to act civilized here. Done with my savage ways.

The results of the entrance exams never came. What came were new cloths, uniforms, to be sewn. Dad brought them together with another teacher who showed me to my new class.

We couldn’t start school that same day. Our uniforms and other requirements printed on a sheet dad held had to be ready before…