By Erick Wamanji
Fear. Anxiety. This is the mood at Olympic Primary School in Kibera. Reason. The Mugumo (fig tree) in the compound is withering. And so there is fear as the schools amulet goes with the marks.
So what?
“This tree is our good luck tree. We have been excelling in exams because of the sacred tree. The moment it started withering, our performance has also been going down. We’re scared that if let to die, Olympic will be no more,” laments James Otieno, the deputy head teacher.
Aha! A yellow cat is out of the bag – at last. Phew! So Olympic’s star performance in KCPE has always been fanned by charm and talisman more than hard work?
And what’s more, even students have bought into this idea. Every morning they mourn as no sign of the tree improving.
To make the matter worse, one time, the school was short of firewood and some bloke came with a power saw slicing into the flesh of the limbs. The whole school went crazy. The man was frantically stopped, but damage had been done.
“When the tree dries like this I also get sick,” Otieno says of a plant that is said to have survived all vagaries.
When we went to the school, we found one of the limbs jutting to the heavens as if soliciting for divine intervention. Part of the tree’s main body is also drying up.
“This is a male mugumo,” Otieno continues. “It is very powerful.”
One wonders if other schools too cut their male mugumo trees so the eruption of strikes.
Forget about that. An appeal has been send out in SOS style. The school is seeking to raise Shs. 20, 000 to resuscitate the “tree of good luck.”
“We called a specialist who assured us that the tree can be reclaimed by constructing a huge tank round it and then pour red soil and manure. That’s what we want if we are to perform well again,” the teacher says.
Anyone out there to bail out Olympic?