When the Education CS at the beginning of this month just from the blues announced that schools will begin reopening from October 12, I felt like the sky had come down crashing on me.
By Grateful OPesa Borrower
With two of my children being candidates both in Form 4 and Class 8 and whom the CS said will be among the batch that will pioneer the reopening, I must say it was the worst news I had heard in a while.
In my Kiandutu, Thika neighbourhood many of us parents had no plans for our children's return to school as all along the government had led us to believe that the earliest that schools could resume was January 2021. But it wasn't and was never to be the case.
When the bittersweet news broke, I was in my 'mjengo' job at Thika's Landless estate and I remember asking one of my colleagues how the minister could have been so unreasonable to give parents such a short notice when he knew so well how hard things were economically.
"They are the government and we have no option other than comply with the directive or risk having our children losing out," my colleague replied.
Download PDF: Here is the Final BBI Report (3MBs)
It is that response that got me into a marathon thinking. I knew that at the end of the week as usual we would get our pay but that was never going to be enough to send my both children to school.
It is during that stream of thoughts when I remembered that I had an OPesa app in my phone from which I had borrowed Sh4,500 less than a month ago and I was yet to repay that loan.
But come our weekly pay, I decided to repay the loan with sheer hope that I could be able to borrow a higher loan amount. The OPesa app never disappointed me! I found that my new loan limit had increased to Sh6,000 which I borrowed immediately. That was on a Saturday, just a day left before the reopening date.
But with my OPesa loan in my M-Pesa wallet I had little to worry about. In fact, on getting home that evening I had confidence to tell the two candidates to begin preparing to report to school on the announced date.
This got them by surprise because I had not touched on that topic since the government gave the directive. But that reality was all made possible by the OPesa app. Thank you OPesa for being a friend indeed!
The article has been translated from Swahili.