Sometime ago, I wrote, in this column, an article that was inspired by a story I heard about an elderly couple that decided to switch homes with a relative who had young children, a young man just starting out in life.
The couple, whose three adult children had long since left home to start their own lives, was retired, and the big, big house that was once filled with life and laughter was filled with loud silence.
They had a five-bedroom mansion with an attached servants’ quarter, a ‘TV room’ upstairs and a study room, and as their knees began to protest with age, they had moved from the master bedroom upstairs and settled in the much smaller guest bedroom downstairs.
It eventually occurred to them that it didn’t make sense to continue living in the big house, hence the decision to ‘loan’ their younger relative with young children their mansion and move into their smaller home, the plan to eventually dispose of the home they had raised their children in.
In light of this story, I asked readers to share their experiences, and I must say that the article raised interesting debate on social media. One response especially stood out, and since then, it keeps coming to mind, and every time it does, I find myself saying, “How wise…”
This gentleman told me that when he and his wife got married, they decided that they would only build their ‘dream’ home after their children completed high school. Reason? They wanted them to attend the best schools they could afford, wherever these schools were located in Nairobi, and also not have to wake up at ungodly hours just to make it to school on time.
Having a permanent abode, a home of their own, he argued, would limit their school options and force their children to travel long distances to and fro school in pursuit of an education. As it is, it is the schools their children attend that determine where they have lived over the years.
The results? Children who get enough sleep are home by 4.30pm, giving them enough time to do homework, put in some extra reading, and have time left over to prepare for the next day. And for the parents?
Saving a substantial amount of money on reduced or zero school transport, since they deliberately rent homes close to their children’s schools. All the while, he had added, he and his wife had been saving towards their dream home, keen to avoid taking out a loan to put up the home they had in mind. “It will not be unnecessarily big,” he had written, “Just enough for us, bearing in mind that our children will one day leave us…”
Of course, there is no right or wrong way of doing it, there is someone who will read this and say, “That can never be me…”, the argument being that you live only once, so why wait until you’re ‘old’ to live like a king? Another would argue that rather than rent a home that you will never own, why not use that rent to pay mortgage?
But this gentleman has a point. The time that many of our children are forced to wake up on school days is inhumane, all in the name of beating our legendary traffic jams. On days that I have an early start and find myself on the road between 5.30am and 6am, I see children either walking to school or at matatu stages waiting for transport.
This shouldn’t be the case, and yet it is. True, in many cases, there are valid reasons for this, but imagine how different our situations would be if we didn’t feel the need to be rooted in one place during our children’s formative years. Wouldn’t their schooling options be wider? What about peace of mind for both parent and child?
