The issue of hygiene has been contentious as long as I can remember. Right from when I was a small boy, my mother and sister made a big deal of being tidy, clean and hygienic.
While in my case I was absolutely tidy, with everything in my room scattered in all places, to them my room was a mess. I never really got the reason why I had to search for a pair of jeans in a stack that would be folded yet I could just pick it from the side of the bed. When I joined boarding school, I sighed with relief, thinking everything was about to changed. Finally, I would be let to live the life I wanted, having my stuff scattered in my own ‘tidy’ way before returning home.
But to my dismay, that was not to be the case. The warden was even worse than my mother, threatening to whip the behinds of those who left their beds unlaid. Boy, did we have a hard time keeping up with this! What the warden had forgotten is that by leaving the bed unmade you were giving it chance to breathe and have some fresh air.
Up till then, I still hadn’t known the reason why wardens don’t get this. When we recently went to visit my cousin at Ndejje Secondary School, he told me they are still being punished for not laying their beds.
But the worst thing was being forced to shower even in the coldest of nights. It was a nightmare. You see, we never had tap water and relied on boreholes. So, the water there changed its temperature according to the atmosphere and climate. And, of course, there were no water heaters, so we had to be subjected to that ‘torture’ every night even if you had taken a bath during the day.
Don’t get me wrong here; I am not saying that bathing is bad or that it should be avoided. All I am saying is it is not a necessity and every one of you reading this has spent a day or two without bathing. Don’t even think of denying, the good Lord is watching.
Since the wardens always checked the feet and armpits to ascertain those who had taken a shower or not, we had to devise means of beating them to the game. The guys in the higher classes had already devised these means.
Luckily for them, no one touched them because they were considered mature but they had passed on the  virus of missing baths to the younger ones.
Shadow bathing involves - have you noticed the tense?- it still happens. Anyway, it involves getting a reasonable amount of water and washing only and I repeat only the feet, the armpits and maybe splashing water on the hair. And that was it, fast, reliable and convenient. By the way, this is on the record; every male teenage has ever done this, even married people do. I need to find a girl to tell me how they do, but I am sure they do. As for us, that is how we survived the warden’s wrath.
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