Aquinas in ‘Temple Run’ mode: Illegal route, prisons, wall jumps

Location: Google play store or iOS store, that’s where you can find the ‘Temple Run’ application. Remember I said Aquinas was life in the fast lane and a place for hard knocks? Yeah, at Aquinas you had to be constantly on the move.

In temple run, if you stop, you are toast. In Aquinas even if you decided to misbehave, you had to be consistent with it. Being lax was at no point an option. You run from the blast of whistle through your period there. Tough terrain shine or rain, but we made it!

This was a school that had an illegal route that incidentally was directly opposite ‘prisons.’ If you opted for that option, you just had to come out of prisons and take the illegal route or take the route and enter prisons.

Prisons, in this case, being the residential and office complex of the Ghana Prisons Service. The waakye joint in their market and their basketball court is another story for another day but surely a story that needs to be told.

Petit confession: I was too ‘correct’ to jump walls, maybe not that but that I was too cautious a ‘fearooo’ to get myself entangled in voluntary nonsense. But many boys had mastered the art and skill of jumping walls into and out of the school.

And then there were the days of ‘hide and seek’ with teachers within the parameters of the school. I remember when Father Batsa once effected an arrest with his vehicle. That man was not only religiously savvy he had almost perfected ‘busting’ boys.

He drove into a number of students and guess what, he managed to drive them back to campus. They walked gallantly in front of his car as he brought them back to the godly precincts from their ungodly sojourn.

He, however, admitted at one assembly session that he had lost his race speed of years back. Relating to us how he thought he had arrested some boys only for them to indirectly say to him ‘catch us if you can,’ boys just run off.

It was in my lifetime as student that Aquinas hired a retired soldier ‘WO’ as security chief. The lanky man was smart, oh yes, he was if not smarter. But boys did prove beyond doubt that they – or do I say we – were the smartest.

The relationship turned out to be a match made in heaven but before WO and his lieutenants could savor one of their rare victories, boys would have cooked a fresh broth of headache and hustle. It was their professional duty but boys didn’t shirk our ‘creative’ capacities as well.

But at every point when we look back, there are a set of people that impacted on us but would hardly be mentioned. The two bus drivers – boneshaker and resource bus, the food vendors at the bush canteen – Ayi ny3 and Auntie Maggie.

And oh ‘Amaliya’ – that old woman who sold bananas, corn and groundnuts under the big tree. The ‘sell out’ vendors at the school canteen, the waiters at the snack bar, the caretaker of the animal farm. The cleaners of the washrooms amongst others. 

With humility and steadfastness we tread the footsteps of our patron saint.
Aquinas, St. Aquinas, from victory to victory, from victory to victorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry!!! – Fathers Batsa and Ben Ohene will understand.