Our classrooms had earthen floors and windows the size of full moons – a truant’s blessing, but I wasn’t one. We sprinkled water every morning after sweeping, to pacify dust, and lugged tins of cow dung, on Fridays, for bi-weekly cementing of floors. That was before the Constituency Development Fund gave classrooms a facelift and saved kids from the displeasure of crouching in flea-infested cowsheds at dawn, before corporal punishment was banned, before after-school fistfights became dishonoured, before the slavery of carrying jerrycans of water to irrigate stunted hedges ended.