I could never see the point of those stories.
We were always being regaled with trials of endurance by those bloody African brothers who never seemed to have a KH within a respectable distance - they always had to have one at LEAST 30 miles away, never on a road but through a forest or a track, across a river if possible to allow for super righteous feats of swimming with book bag on head or canoeing against the current in crocodile infested waters. With a bit of luck there would be a band of robbers on the track / river / forest who would be so impressed at the brothers super righteous feats of endurance that they would swap chickens for literature and promise never to rob again.
I used to think - but we live in a first world country with cars and buses. What do they want me to do? Leave the car at home and pull myself along by my lips to the KH in another town?
I also used to wonder where these people got all this time from to make a 60 mile round trip to the KH. How was I supposed to match that when my first world routine imposed on me a 9 to 5 existence, Monday to Friday. Where was I going to find time to convert bands of robbers on my 3 hour hike to the meeting? It made no sense whatsoever.
And those bloody torture stories! How awful. Im sure they were probably true, lots of them. But what was the point of terrorising a whole generation of children in countries that were unlikely to ever experience that kind of backward brutality. I mean - is it likely that I was ever going to have bycicle spokes pushed through my genitals in the UK? But thats EXACTLY what I spent my entire childhood in fear of! There was no point to those stories, other than the fact that nasty old men used to love repeating them from the platform and got some kind of gruesome kick from imagining that we might have to go through that one day.
