My
house is a few paces off a busy highway where there is always heavy traffic. And
every second, even right as I type this, under the scorching sun of a 12.30 pm
harmattan-less December afternoon in Ilorin, I hear those kids hawking, jumping
from one moving car’s window to another, to another, to another, screaming ‘pure water tutu wa’ dressed either in
rags or makeshift clothing torn at every considerable part but hard to call a
rag because at least it is wholesome. They do this all day and every day. I wonder
very often if they have ever entered into any sort of educational institution,
if they have plans to. I wonder where they would be in the next, say, twenty
years– they would probably not hawk pure water to speeding cars anymore, maybe
not, maybe they would have gotten better ways to make more money and or maybe
they would no longer be under the guardianship of the individual that makes
them hawk pure water in this kind of sweltering weather. Maybe at that time,
they would have become the guardian. It is pure water, there is not much to be
made from it: if they are lucky to sell a bag of 20 a day, they make two
hundred naira, two hundred naira cannot buy a dozen biscuits anymore. It is
hard not to think about these things if you live where I live and cannot think
about anything for one second without getting distracted by a little girl
shouting ‘pure water.’ A boy once carried a red bowl on his head and sat on the
curb between the two lanes, he had eight sachets of pure water in the bowl. I asked
how old he was, he was seven. I asked how long he had been standing, he had
been standing since morning. I bought all eight sachets from him and told him
to go home. I came out ten minutes later and saw same boy with same bowl on
same head but with new sachets. I passed. It is not a serious problem when the
people that have the problem do not consider that they have a problem.
I
just saw two tweets I found interesting because I have a significant problem
with Twitter on Saturdays: I can’t stay off. The first tweet is by a lady, she
tweets: I don’t think there’s any amount of love in this world that will make
me marry poor tbqh, and I don’t apologize for this sentiment.
It
is an interesting tweet for two reasons, i. Poverty is relative; the poverty of
some is the life dream of others. ii. Love is also relative. I have never felt
it, but I can tell you for free that there are shades of love, degrees of love
that can get you to do the stupidest things (or in this case, the things you
never thought you could do.) I preach, usually, that if you cannot afford to
take care of yourself and two others, you have absolutely no business thinking
about marriage. And on a personal basis, it should work both ways; meaning that
I can take care of two others and my wife can take care of two others. So that
we can both take care of ourselves and four other people as at the point of
marriage. But here is the thing I have learnt so much in this absolute plane
crash of a year that 2016 has turned out to be: Everybody. Is. Different. I
know people who get married with nothing and they build themselves from the
bottom up, together. I respect that. I
do.
The
second tweet was from a church account, name withheld, the church tweeted:
TESTIMONY: By faith, medical protols are broken with the delivery of 2 bouncing
boys when gynaecological scans confirmed them to be girls.
This
tweet is interesting because it brazenly tells that boys are better than girls,
and it is a TESTIMONY when you do not have a girl child. There are no other ways
to look at it unless you want to look away because it is your church or it is your
Daddy in the Lord who is the Oga at the top– and you jump when he tells you
that he wanna see jumping or you let him spray your eyes with insecticide or
you let him sleep with your wife because she has evil spirit. :’). There is no
miracle here. Churches these days seem to seek out avenues to show how they are
in some sort of competition with medicalization. But it doesn’t have to be a
competition, both institutions could cohabit happily: in this tweet, for
example: how about the sonographer was simply wrong (as they often are)?
You
may see it differently, as I said: Everybody is different.
It
is now twenty minutes past two and I have nothing else to say but to ask you to
be safe and be kind.
2 comments:
'I preach, usually, that if you cannot afford to take care of yourself and two others, you have absolutely no business thinking about marriage.'
I totally, totally agree! Wholeheartedly.
On the second tweet you mentioned though, about the couple with the child gender change, when I initially heard of it, my first reaction was outrage. 'So are these people trying to say that a female child is less important than a male??' But I found out the full story. Their 'testimony' was that God granted them what they asked for. They wanted male children and that's what they are getting, even though the initial sonogram revealed otherwise. I don't think they meant any harm, lol.
Thanks for stopping by ! :)
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