I suppose I will always have a special fondness for this place because this was the first boarding school that I went to in Africa. I spent 4 years of my life here--that's about 1/6 of my life and an even greater portion of my childhood.
The building in front is the boy's dorm and the hill behind was known to us as Mt. Sanderson. We would go up the hill sometimes during our Sunday walks where we restless children would have an opportunity to hike someplace and play.
This is my grade 2 class at Kent Academy. I remember entering the class in the middle of the year and the teacher got my classmates to write something to welcome me in because I was new. This was the first class I entered in boarding school and I followed these classmates into grade 6.
The second guy from the left is Biyi and he was my first roommate at boarding school. He quite made me feel at home as I got settled down and we became good friends. We did quite a bit of stuff together--like soccer, baseball, dodgeball, tetherball, bottlecap soccer, stamp collecting, as well as a whole lot of other things. We stuck together most of the time and we were in the same class until grade 6 where I left for Singapore.
The teacher in the photo is Miss Sneath and I remembered her to be a very nice teacher whom we all liked (maybe because we were scared of some of the other teachers). She taught us all our subjects--math, reading, writing and spelling.
This is my grade 5 class and if you compare these faces with those in the grade 2 class, you'll notice that some of the faces are the same. There were a couple of new students entering as well as a few who might have left, but on the whole, this class was bigger.
Galmi Hospital lies at the foot of a hill where we have a water tank. A well near the hospital draws water from maybe a thousand feet down and then pumps it up to this water tank for storage. Because it's at the top of the hill, we automatically get water pressure.
This is the hospital set up by SIM, and it's the place where my father works as a surgeon. It's not a very clean hospital by developed country standards, but it'll do here in Niger. When I was young, I would often look forward to seeing my father in the hospital, be it in the pharmacy, the wards, the OPD, or OR (which I couldn't enter, but could peep through a window in the door). Recently, they put up a sign in front of the hospital that reads "Hôpital de Galmi"
This scene is very typical of what we see when we travel in Niger. Normally we travel by car when we can avoid travelling by plane. Journeys may take a short 45 minutes up to seven hours by road and the background in this photo is what we see most of the journey. The town in front looks like any other town or village in Niger.
Created 18 January, 1999