Elijah’s Last Journey To School

The entire Mallam D/A Primary School pupils and teachers and others from the cluster of schools in the vicinity broke down in tears when the body of 14-year-old Elijah Boakye was brought to the school last Friday.

Elijah Boakye, who was the Assistant School Prefect of the school, was on May 28, 2007 struck down by lightning in the classroom and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

Two others who were also affected by the lightning have responded to treatment and had returned to school.

It was a sorrowful sight as pupils and teachers waited patiently and anxiously for the body to be brought to the school for his name to be struck out of the class register.

The Class Six teacher, Madam Angela Rose Oppong started marking her register for the day and after mentioning Elijah Boakye's name three consecutive times the entire class responded absent, his name was struck off the register which was greeted with spontaneous wailing and weeping.

The death of Elijah has frightened his classmates to the extent that most of them absented themselves from school the following day and it took the school's counsellor and the Circuit Supervisor, who is also a reverend minister with the Methodist Church to convince the pupils to come back to school.

Giving some background information to the incident, Madam Oppong told the Junior Graphic that, that fateful morning, the class was having a Mathematics lesson when she detected that the weather was dark.

“After I went out to check and saw that it would be stormy, I asked all children outside to enter their classrooms. Then, I asked my class children to close all the windows and the doors, so that after the storm the class will resume.

“I was meditating when I heard a loud noise and some few seconds later, there was noise in the class and all the children were running towards me. I got up and to my great surprise, Elijah was almost lifeless on the floor.

I rushed out and called for help and we took him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead,” Madam Oppong said.

Story by Severious Kale Dery