Why I didn’t become a Pilot: True Story

Fast backwards 20 years ago. Then ask young Lorot Son of the Hills: What do you want to be when you grow up? Answer: When I grow up I want to be a Pilot.

And I believed I could be a pilot.

I had good eyesight. I had the excitement. I made toy aeroplanes and flew them using my hands. Those simple 1+1, 2x2, I could answer them like any other child, though I could use my fingers and toes and a bunch of sticks. After all, every one has his own methods of solving problems.

When a plane flew atop the azure Kacheliba skies, I could run around and see myself as that pilot. Such were my dreams, such were my aspirations. I always saw myself as a pilot. One day, a plane ( I forget which model) landed on the peak of Kacheliba Hill. I remember I went home that day and told my mama behind the hills that I have made up my mind that I will be a pilot.

I had to be a pilot, at least that is what my childhood fantasy told me. While in the plains of Kacheliba, I swam in River Suam, played ‘banta’ with those of Achevi, the Merciless ‘bantaa sniper’, acted as commandos in our childplay toy guns made out of ‘Jumla’. I went to ‘Mtelezo’ and bruised my buttocks severally at Mlima Shabaha. I made toy vehicles from dry maize stalks and wires.

But still, I had my childhood dream of one day becoming a Pilot. Somehow someday I had to be a Pilot.

But Mathematics killed my childhood ambition. Geography sealed my fate. Physics drove the last nail in my coffin.
This is how it started. First those Mathematics teachers progressed from simple things that I could understand like 1+1, 2x1. They went to fractions, Greatest Common Denominator and Least Common Multiple. I think that is where my dream of ever becoming a pilot hit the wall. That was when the rain started beating Lorot Son of the Hills, as Chinua Achebe would say. I calculated squares, pie charts, circumferences, diameters, radii and everything that could be calculated. But I never saw the sense in all these. But to be a pilot I was supposed to make sense in all these.

And one November Morning many years ago while doing my K.C.P.E. Mathematics, I looked sharp with my brand new Mathematics Set, Compass, HB Pencil. Questions like two people left two taps running, one at 9.30 a.m and another at 10 a.m., how long will it take for them to fill a bucket?. I don’t remember the questions very well. I swear on a bible that if I saw a Mathematical problem with more than two sentences I just knew that I was finished. I counted that as a lost cause, I muttered ‘Pass’ and moved on to another ugly Problem. Now back to the question. I look at the question. Two taps are running. Who in the world would leave two taps running and have the hard-headedness of knowing the time at which they were left running? I grow up in Kacheliba with no luxury of taps and somebody somewhere has the temerity of asking me to calculate such a loss.

So in my K.C.P.E. I reasoned out my Mathematics paper, carefully laid out the formulae that I had learnt to every problem I saw. I had reached Number 35/50 when the invigilator announced that I had only 5 minutes to finish the paper. I was always that clever kid. I took my HB Pencil and with the calculative mind of a tiger, I crossed the ellipses, A, C, B, D randomly. There was no way you could have A,A, A, A, following each other sequentially. It had to be systematic, an A here, a B there, a C here, a D there.

And I survived. But only for a short while. In Form One, we were introduced to the Number Line. Questions like -2, -3. Am seated there and am thinking: What is the problem with our education system? If you are minus 2 and minus 3 why should that bother me?
Then that –ve and –ve is +ve. Up to now am struggling to understand it. From that moment on, I started looking at piloting as a distant dream. Something akin to what you read in books for fun. Some chap scared us even more when he walked with Abbot Physics and always talked about Ohms Law, Anomalous Expansion of Water and such stuff. In physics, I am asked why the telephone lines slacken when there is much heat and I think to myself: C’mon if those damn lines want to slacken, tighten or do some acrobatics who am I, Lorot Son of the Hills, to know? Let them do their thing for it doesn't pinch me.
So as I progressed in High School it became clearer and clearer to me that perhaps being a pilot was not my forte. On top of that, I cannot make quick decisions. If I were your co-driver and you asked me whether we should negotiate to the right or left I would say something like: Let’s see, why do you want to negotiate to the right or left, May be we can try left first and see.

I hear that is bad for a pilot. No second thoughts. No after thoughts. Nowadays I read about young ladies who have done I-don’t-know-what Commercial Hours and I feel embarrassed. But I console myself saying my mind was not cut out for piloting because am sure passengers would be like: Lorot Son of the Hills, again! No. No. That hare-brained soul didn’t know where some knobs in the cockpit were. ( That is, if there are knobs in planes in the first place).

I find consolation in the fact that even you could not make it to be a pilot. We belong to this small secret club of guys whose Piloting Dreams actually never took off and somehow plunged on top of shrubs in our little villages behind the hills. Yes. That is my consolation.