“Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens” Genesis 19:24, the quotation lingered in my naïve mind as I watch our “Paradise” reduced to rubbles from afar. The commotion that had woken the lazy birds of Old Fadama, notoriously known as Sodom and Gomorrah, in plea of their cherished nest to be spared by the uncharitable authorities. The pandemonium was too much to bear, Scores of people had gathered to be eyewitness to this epic story. Tears started streaming down the face of my mother as she looked at me.
I could decipher the story those tears were telling. A child could not but join in unison. It’s barely a couple of weeks today when my family was hit by the death of Papa at the Circle Inferno disaster. Mama almost went nuts by this stunning tragedy. Her wail nearly ripped off our already leaking roof. To me it was a big blow akin to the ones Floyd Mayweather Junior throws to finish his opponents, in the sense that it was just a couple of weeks to write my Basic Education Certificate Exams (B.E.C.E). The pain was excruciating and the trauma was inexplicable for a 14year old boy like me. I could see failure looming and a possible sad ending to my education.
It was as if that wasn’t enough doom to be spelled on an innocent child in such an early stage of his life. The B.E.C.E was a total tragic tale with the cancellation of almost all the papers owing to what was termed as an outbreak of leaked questions known as “Apor” in our local dialect. Apparently no fault of mine, it was a bitter pill to swallow, the four cardinal points met in my head.
I had scarcely recuperated from these series of devastations to prepare ahead for the rescheduled exam when the A.M.A turned my house into an excavation site yesterday. An exercise which was deemed as extempore and seemed to have been planned surreptiously by the city authorities by many a resident got us to our heels to save our dear lives.Oh! I exclaimed, as I looked at the debris of the “Total wipe out” mission. There lies my Akiola text book in tatters, that Mathematical set Mama borrowed from our neighbour and my school bag which is 8years older than me. The little items Mama bought for my going to the senior high school are smoldering among the debris of Sodom and Gomorrah.
I began to ask questions rhetorically, did the A.M.A think of the resident B.E.C.E candidate of Sodom and Gomorrah? Did they care for the already wounded B.E.C.E candidate? Only to aggravate their plight. Somewhere on the street as I laid my aching head on stinking cardboards that evening to catch some sleep, my dreams visited me once again, this time not in brightness but in full blurness.Mama then suddenly appeared and assured me, I took consolation in the fact that we are homeless, not hopeless, if only I wake up to see the lights tomorrow.