Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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THE faint-hearted birds had retired early to bed with their cadence leaving the crickets and the toads to reign with their creepy tunes. We bolted our windows our doors; then our eyes, sprawled like sardines on a piece of a locally woven mat. A troop of some small-but-mighty vampires also lives on our “bed”. I saw the other children being struck by them intermittently. I became the unselfish host of the mosquitoes –offering a feast for free.
My eyes remained ajar, blurring every image even as the sympathetic moon of the night provided an uninterrupted light through the roof thatch and the crevices on the wall. A pot full of herbs concocted earlier in the day sat on the grill on a corner of our densely populated hut.
I caught a glimpse of an anopheles mosquito gliding cheerfully towards me; now I’m 100% awake like kerosene. I think I heard one of the mosquitoes say, “Wow! This is a place to be…” I was furious about their boastful gestures and wish I could get hold of them and retrieve our blood.
Ours is the first hut on the border of Sahelian Savannah where minors who were vaccinated against meningitis before the virulent outbreak were kept. The children in the second hut are down with rashes, chronic headache and neck stiffness. In the third hut is the batch with more complicated illness like deafness and epilepsy.
The fourth is a morgue!
No family member objected Uncle Tabo’s decision of bringing me to the village after my father was deployed to join the peacekeeping force in Darfur. I miss my parents – Father assured me that he’d be back soon, maybe when the war ends! For mother, cancer already took her so there’s no coming back. All I have left is my big dream of joining the fourth realm of royalty tomorrow.
The night crawled, the cocks won’t crow for they had their own wounds to stitch, so daylight came unannounced.
The entire village is convulsed with grief and fears of children dying every night, so to unravel the cause and find possible awakening from this nightmare, the most revered priest was summoned by the elders of our land to consult the deity. He did openly at the village square with virtually all villagers present. The priest posits vehemently that the afflictions are a show of rage from the gods. “It is an intractable curse…it’s revocable though, we must appease our gods with a ritual, yes! Only one sacrifice and all our afflictions will blow away”. My favourite part! We can’t wait; oya! read your list of palm oil, chicken and cow.
His eyelids flickered simultaneously with the sound he made with his gong, he stopped striking the gong for a moment, gazed like a owl, took a tempestuous sigh and said “For the ritual…” at this point, the silence at the square dwarfs that of the cemetery; the attention on the priest is the same that a good figure gets from the promiscuous eyes of men. He broke the news “We need the lateral incisor of a cockroach, the thumb nail of a python, liver of an ant and …” “STOP!” An elder interrupted his irksome ritual ingredient list.
6 weeks later…
Sometime in April, we had recovered from the pranks the priest played on us but not from our ailing hearts when a renowned pharmacist accompanied by doctors without borders came to our rescue with an untested antibiotic. Our land the lab; our people the specimen.
They left the next day without looking back only for us to start building more huts to relief the fourth. It took us a while to patch their footprints …we filed a (barred) suit and eventually won a trip to Rome.
My eyes remained ajar, blurring every image even as the sympathetic moon of the night provided an uninterrupted light through the roof thatch and the crevices on the wall. A pot full of herbs concocted earlier in the day sat on the grill on a corner of our densely populated hut.
I caught a glimpse of an anopheles mosquito gliding cheerfully towards me; now I’m 100% awake like kerosene. I think I heard one of the mosquitoes say, “Wow! This is a place to be…” I was furious about their boastful gestures and wish I could get hold of them and retrieve our blood.
Ours is the first hut on the border of Sahelian Savannah where minors who were vaccinated against meningitis before the virulent outbreak were kept. The children in the second hut are down with rashes, chronic headache and neck stiffness. In the third hut is the batch with more complicated illness like deafness and epilepsy.
The fourth is a morgue!
No family member objected Uncle Tabo’s decision of bringing me to the village after my father was deployed to join the peacekeeping force in Darfur. I miss my parents – Father assured me that he’d be back soon, maybe when the war ends! For mother, cancer already took her so there’s no coming back. All I have left is my big dream of joining the fourth realm of royalty tomorrow.
The night crawled, the cocks won’t crow for they had their own wounds to stitch, so daylight came unannounced.
The entire village is convulsed with grief and fears of children dying every night, so to unravel the cause and find possible awakening from this nightmare, the most revered priest was summoned by the elders of our land to consult the deity. He did openly at the village square with virtually all villagers present. The priest posits vehemently that the afflictions are a show of rage from the gods. “It is an intractable curse…it’s revocable though, we must appease our gods with a ritual, yes! Only one sacrifice and all our afflictions will blow away”. My favourite part! We can’t wait; oya! read your list of palm oil, chicken and cow.
His eyelids flickered simultaneously with the sound he made with his gong, he stopped striking the gong for a moment, gazed like a owl, took a tempestuous sigh and said “For the ritual…” at this point, the silence at the square dwarfs that of the cemetery; the attention on the priest is the same that a good figure gets from the promiscuous eyes of men. He broke the news “We need the lateral incisor of a cockroach, the thumb nail of a python, liver of an ant and …” “STOP!” An elder interrupted his irksome ritual ingredient list.
6 weeks later…
Sometime in April, we had recovered from the pranks the priest played on us but not from our ailing hearts when a renowned pharmacist accompanied by doctors without borders came to our rescue with an untested antibiotic. Our land the lab; our people the specimen.
They left the next day without looking back only for us to start building more huts to relief the fourth. It took us a while to patch their footprints …we filed a (barred) suit and eventually won a trip to Rome.
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