by Aluta Nite
Since Zuka moved houses from living with them to new premises with his wife, none of the members of his employer’s family had been to the new house except knowing that it was house number ABCD in estate called XYZ and the bus number to the area was EFG taken from the central bus station.
Before he was relieved of his job, one of the sons of the employer with another relative decided to pay him a visit without his invitation to see how he lived. As he was coming from work, they followed him secretly and took the next bus after the one he had boarded and headed to his place without his knowledge.
After alighting from the bus, they hunted for the house till they found it and found him at home just trying to settle in after arrival. He was terribly shocked to see them. He literary panicked. His wife was not relaxed either.
They did not stay for long. They excused themselves that they were just passing by because they were in the neighborhood with another friend of theirs who was checking on a house in the next estate. But what they saw in the house really surprised them. He had very little stuff when he and his wife left the employer’s family home three years back.
Now his small house was full to the brim with things that he did not need, could not use and were expensive too. Whether he was storing them for someone like his former boss nobody got to know, but some of the things could have also been partly purchased with money from the employer’s business.
Complicated Genya
The story of this man called Genya was stranger than fiction. Born in a big family of nine children and by parents who worked very hard and made sure that all their seven boys and two daughters went to school up to where their children desired and their God given brains could take them.
This was a remarkable feat given the fact that not many parents could afford this even if their children yearned for education and also the fact that some parents too cared less for education. Herding goats, sheep and cows was the mainstay of many young boys while girls did house chores and got married early.
Genya was not the firstborn in his family. His elder brother and other forerunner siblings were well established education-wise as he grew up and therefore paved the way for him as mentors. He was not the lastborn either but in between somewhere.
Each child in the family seemed to have some steam for his or her own outstanding career without aping each other and this formed quite a formidable force in this hard working and determined family. Their parents were obviously proud seeing their children perform so well in different schools and reach greater heights than them education and career-wise.
Genya’s eldest brother was an entomologist after getting a doctoral degree in those studies both overseas and locally. He now resided with his wife and two children in the city where he managed an international organization’s research center.
His brother's wife was equally highly educated with a master’s degree and did research for a governmental cum non-governmental organization in the city. Their two children were in a private elementary and middle schools pursuing their early education.
After obtaining his bachelor’s degree locally in medicine, he proceeded abroad to get his master’s degree in the same study. After he qualified, he stayed abroad to do his doctoral studies in medical pathology. In a spate of five years he accomplished both degrees and returned home armed with a slew of certificates to put to use.
Genya at this juncture was not married yet neither did he have a steady girlfriend that anybody knew of. He was mostly a loner, but he enjoyed reading and his drink whenever possible especially in the evenings after work and during the weekends.
He had never owned a house in the city nor rented one because while studying locally, he was in boarding schools and halls of residence. During the holidays, he stayed with his parents in the upcountry. When he graduated from the local college and while making arrangements for further studies, he stayed with his elder brother who had a city home.
On his return from overseas, he went to stay with his eldest brother again who saw him off on his departure and met him on arrival back. His other siblings were scattered in other towns far away.
He got a job with the government’s biggest university and referral hospital in the city at the pathology department soon after arrival back, where he did both teaching and performed pathological services at the laboratories and morgue when called upon.
Meanwhile, he continued to live with his brother’s family. He did normal five-day week work with weekends off except on certain occasions when he was called upon to do extra work over the weekends.
He ate with his brother’s family and shared everything in the house with them except his own self-contained room for the night. His room was outside the main house therefore it was pretty private. He spent a lot of time with his few colleagues from work in clubs or bars drinking and merry making especially in the afternoons and early nights over the weekends.
All the time he stayed in his brother’s house while awaiting allocation of a house of his own by the government, he acted very strangely to his brother’s family. His niece and nephew in particular took a lot of resentment towards him because of his unusual behavior.
Even his own brother and his sister in-law were stunned with his behavior sometimes and it is only his brother who could question him about it. The children and their mother chose to shrink and leave it at that. In other words, they were scared of him.
He was always the last to arrive home in the evenings when everybody else was eating dinner or watching television or just having a conversation. And his arrival would upset the whole scenario because of his demeanor and responses.
In short, he would ring the bell at the gate or the one at the main door if the gate was open and woe unto the person who would as expected rush to open the gate or door. That person would be met with so much coldness that one would feel an imaginary hard slap across the face.
The greeting that the person would put forward would not be replied to and he would not offer one either. Imagine this happening to a child. A child needs to be put at ease and he did not care to do this. The children therefore refused to be opening neither the gate nor the door for him because they found the whole situation scary and awkward.
His brother and his sister in-law therefore did the opening although his sister in-law was not comfortable either doing the job, but she had no alternative when her husband was not home.
And when he entered the house, he had no courtesy to exchange pleasantries with whoever was inside and this made everybody inside feel chilly and coiled. He did the same in the mornings before leaving the house for work.
The occasional times when his brother asked him why he behaved that way, his response was, “I can see that everybody is looking fine and unharmed in any way so why should I bother them!”
The situation went on like this continuously by rubbing everybody the wrong way to the extent that the children decided to call it quits and race to their rooms every time he came into the picture.
During his sixth month in his brother’s house, when he had just been allocated a house of his own and he was making final arrangements to shift, something even stranger happened. As usual, he went out one Saturday afternoon to one of his usual dens and never returned that night.
Being an adult, it was assumed that he knew what he was doing or maybe now he had a steady
girlfriend and had decided to take matters a notch further by staying with her in her home or in a hotel till the next day.
His brother therefore did not make much out of it or take any action that day being a Sunday, assuming that he was having a nice time somewhere and would return in the evening or early night in order to go to work the next day.
He never returned that Sunday. He never returned during the wee hours of Monday morning. After eight o'clock, Monday morning, his brother panicked and called his place of work to find out if he was there. He was not there. He then checked with other close relatives in the city if they saw him and none of them was aware
of his whereabouts or knew anything.
He therefore decided to file a missing person's report with the police. The search for him then started in earnest because as per the laws of the land, forty-eight hours were over from when he was last seen.
His brother was told by the police to check all the morgues in the city first of all and inform them accordingly of his findings. His body was not in any of the morgues therefore it was assumed that he could be alive and well somewhere.
After one week with no sign of him or his body, fear gripped his brother who had already informed their parents and all his other siblings. He was being looked for anywhere both by the police and the brother and other relatives with no success.
Then during the course of the second week, a decomposing body was found one early morning far away in another estate behind a public sanitation building. When the police was called and informed about the body, they went there and immediately assumed it was him because of the description of the clothing he was last seen in.
The police directed his brother to the place and he went and identified the body as that of his missing younger brother. The police concluded that he was murdered elsewhere and his body dumped where it was found because there was no evidence of struggle or blood spilt at the site. And the neighborhood reported having seen or heard anything that would have given leads to the police.
The body was taken to the morgue and funeral arrangements began at his brother’s house. Whatever happened to him to cause his death was not revealed and especially going by the circumstances of where the body was found and the status of the body.
His remains were taken for burial to his parents’ home after another week. And that ended the life of this strange doctor.
Peres and Alfreda
Peres and Alfreda were both city girls who were born and brought up in the same city where their fathers worked and their mothers were housewives raising several children ranging from babies to adolescents and doing daily house chores ranging from washing, cleaning, buying food and cooking apart from meeting other daily family demands.
Both these two girls were firstborns who did not seem to like school much, not because their parents were not for education, but simply because the girls themselves lacked interest in academia and played truancy with school and schoolwork.
On the way to school they would play a lot and before they realized, they were late and it looked more like they did it purposely to be late and miss the first lessons. They were happy in school when it was games time in the playground chasing one another, jumping ropes and having small gossips with other girls.
Meantime, time was not standing still in wait for anybody to catch up with schoolwork and promotions to next classes and schools. Their bodies were changing and childhood was changing to puberty and on to teenage. And the two never learned or developed perseverance with school as was expected. Yet they heard it over and over from adults around them that good things do not come easily.
The girls both became pregnant just as they were getting ready to witness the onset of their first menses, a very sad thing indeed. Of course they got overwhelmed and they became mothers while they still needed mothering themselves as they were still like chicks being shooed from grains. Their parents did not like witnessing the mistakes made by their daughters but they did not know what to do once the pregnancies ballooned by the month.
And the issues did not stop there. It was like floodgates had been opened for them. They both gave birth out of wedlock and did not plan to get married after that either. Whether they desired to get married later or not is not known but sure as day follows night, they planted more seeds of pregnancies and more babies were harvested.
When the babies were one year old they got pregnant again and gave birth again and again and it became the norm for them. Whoever was responsible for the pregnancies could not be pointed out because there were many men hovering around them whenever they were free from pregnancies.
They had no jobs and survived by burdening their old fathers who were still employed despite noticing that some of their younger siblings were coming of age and unlike them, had gainful employment after completion of high school without wavering. These younger siblings did not go to college, but they finished school and became independent financially and were able to transition to adulthood smoothly.
To a stranger who did not know the families well could have concluded that their children were their youngest siblings. In the end Peres had nine children and Alfreda had ten, but they were still young and therefore could have more.
The sad thing about it all is that the families’ houses were not adequate. The housing was city council duplexes consisting of two bedrooms each. Children slept more or less on top of each other in search of space for a body to lie down straight or comfortably. All the spaces in the houses were taken including the kitchens and the corridors. Eating was not to satisfy hunger but to have something small in the stomach to stop the rumbling.
Many a times, plain water did the job but not for their young children who would scream their heads off when hunger turned into anger. Clothes were passed down from older children to the younger ones. Going to school was no mean feat as raising school fees was a tall border.
When things became impossible for Alfreda’s parents, they packed their few belongings and headed to their upcountry home where they could do subsistence farming on the ancestral land and left the house to her, her children and some of her younger siblings who were not yet independent work-wise.
Alfreda’s youngest siblings went with their parents to start and experience a new life.
Peres’ parents could not go anywhere despite the enormous economic pressure because they had no land anywhere. They had to stay put and face the worst of it in the city come rain or sunshine.
If these two ladies were call girls, maybe they could have made ends meet by using the hard earned money from the profession but they did not seem to be in it otherwise the dire financial handicap glaring at them would not have been so.
It looked like they just had a weakness of the body and mind without thinking of the consequences to go with all this. In other words, money was not their motive. They also did not seem to regret their deeds otherwise they would have made more informed decisions after one or two mistakes, but it did not look like so.
It was like time stood still for them and there were no alternatives. The positive thing about both of them though was that they could afford beautiful smiles and laughter despite the ugly situations facing them.
Other people could have thought of suicide, running away from it all or living by complaining perennial, but not them. To them, every day was a Sunday. It was only each of them who knew who the father of each and every child was, but they never made demands on the men otherwise the situations would have been a little bit different or easier.
They were the easiest to deal with as far as men were concerned.
Waking up and not knowing what the day would entail or bring did not worry them. They took it as it came, embraced it and moved on to the next. Even efforts to get menial jobs to lessen the burdens at home were not made. They simply rolled on by, as every day would take care of itself.
It is also not known whether their parents raised issues with them about the dire situations because neighbors never reported hearing confrontations at the two homes. Maybe, their parents were overwhelmed enough to accept the situations the way they were and just moved on a day at a time.
Raising Funds
In the name of pulling together and pooling resources to aid worthy courses as the first indigenous leader of the nation advocated from day one as the country achieved independence from the colonial rulers, the citizens continued with this nice gesture over the years even as the government institution changed hands.
In the real sense, this was and still is a wonderful way to accomplish tasks that a lone man, a few individuals, several people, an institution or organization could not achieve. For example, when i
t came to doing things like extending or renovating a school in a community where the local authorities or central government was not involved or could not afford, this gesture worked perfectly.
Or issues like building places of worship, dispensaries, markets, digging of wells and many other things in communities. This gesture extended to helping even in educating needy children whose parents were unable to pay tuition yet the students were bright enough to qualify to attend designated centers of learning of high academic excellence.
Other areas covered were like financing medical aid for some sick individuals who suddenly found themselves in helpless situations because of unforeseen calamities.
In the real world, this good gesture was abused to the extent that it disgusted many a folk who used to play their part fully in this endeavor. This was because many able bodies turned this good gesture into a milch cow where they could get easy money to do what was not classified as needing help.
