How I Learnt to Wear Decent Shoes

Before I landed a piano-teaching job in 2015 at a school in Nairobi, I never cared about how the shoes I wore were. One evening in 2013 for instance, I walked into a neighbor's graduation party with unpolished leather shoes.

A young man brought to my attention that the kind of shoes we wear matter, but it's like I didn't heed his advice because when I started working as a piano teacher in 2015, I would sometimes turn up with muddy shoes.

Once when I went to a washroom in the mall that housed the music school, I annoyed a cleaner for using tissue paper to clean my shoes. But he let me go when I apologized.

At another time when I turned up with muddy shoes, a fellow teacher instructed me to go clean them. It was a humiliating experience but one that taught me how poverty can affect someone negatively.

Later on, two fellow teachers, Greg and Chris, told me smart women look at shoes when judging men. I think they told me so after observing how my shoes were. And man, Greg and Chris were kind fellows.

Soon afterwards, I bought new shoes. Then I started leaving home in my old shoes and changing to the new ones before entering the mall. A teacher called Musa, who the school employed at around that time, noted how clean my shoes were.

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