Saturday Short Story.

Reflection.

We were not seated under a palm tree when my mother told me about a once beloved country that is now ill.
We were comfortable on a wooden bench as we took in the soft breeze of the evening since the glorious electricity providers had decided to withold power supply.
This was a custom we had gotten used to, so complaining about the inadequacy of light or it's stability had now become a rite of passage which was to be calmed in another hour or hours or sometimes days when the screams of Up Nepa! Up Nepa!, By little children in the neighborhood would rent the air.

My mother told me about the civil war which was fought with the blood and sweat of young boys who had been taken away forcefully from the grips of their mothers at an age where the only manliness they could exude was to run errands with their adolescent sisters and report how many men may have called out to her on the road.
The kind of war that had left children with bloated tummies and thin sickly arms that all reeked of malnourishment.
It was during this same war that stock fish was rinsed many times to use it's salty water to cook food as there was scarcity of salt and many families would gather together in groups to eat the not so tasty meal obtainable.

She told me the story of the young man from her kindred, soldiers had stopped on the way and had wanted to enlist him in the army, this man raising his voice, began to shout " I am medically unfit" a declaration he made so as to escape dying in the fight for his fatherland. A name he was to be known by many years later even as his encounter had become a funny legend over the years.

My mother spoke with nostalgia and humility about the desire of many parents who then in years past fried garri, soaked cassava, smoked fish, rowed canoes and traded in palm oil all to be able to acquire quality education which was existent then for their children. It was not just education at the secondary level but up until university. The assurance that a university degree was the fastest and most respectable passport out of the land of poverty, the passport to be adorned with the regalia of literacy, possibilities and opportunities within and outside the shores of the country.

Today she sees a different picture that supports her kinsman's declaration about the country.
Young people have passed the rigours of schooling but the university degree now seems like a mere cardboard size A4paper that states that the recipient sat for tests and passed examinations. It is not a passport out of poverty as the lofty dreams of the today's youth is suffocated by the infections of bad governance, ineptitude of the leaders, corruption and the monster called unemployment.

Today a tiny ray of hope glints in the distance and we all are hoping it's not an utopian sighting. However if we are all medically unfit who then is medically fit to revive a medically unfit country?

(C) Francisca Okwulehie
September 30/ 2016.