11/06/2024
It was a bright sunny Tuesday afternoon, and there I was, sitting for my KCPE Kiswahili paper. Time was ticking, literally, because I was sitting at the front row, with the classroom clock directly in front of me, emphasising the passing of every second with its ticking and tocking. That said, I was in no rush to scribble answers because this was Kiswahili, hands down my least favourite subject. I was blissfully shooting blanks (no pun intended), you could say.
The room was dead silent, the only sound heard being the relentless scribbling by the bookworms. This was it. The paper could essentially make or break me should I have failed to attain the necessary grade, and from the look of things, I was tanking. Then, from the back of the classroom, commotion broke out.
There were noises of desks being shoved aside and around, teachers rushing in. One teacher, as if knowingly, rushed with a bucket of water. Another brought a mug of water. A female student, pale as death itself, slumped over her desk. I couldn’t decipher whatever was happening, until I was brought back to my senses when I felt something completely strange was happening to me.
Initially, I thought my bladder had given in at my tender age of 13 and that I had wet my pants. I couldn’t stomach the thought, just as I couldn't lose my cool. That afternoon, the role of damsel in distress was unfortunately already taken by my classmate, she-that-was-slumped-over-her-desk. I later learnt that the cause of the earlier pandemonium originating from the back of the classroom was she-that-was-slumped-over-her-desk’s menstruation, hers more public and severe than mine, making her my comrade in menstruation.
Read more: https://debunk.media/how-my-first-period-snuck-up-on-me/
