Chapter Four : Hunger
Psychiatrists say scream and let out the pain or repeatedly jot down what triggers your affliction in a page daily but how do you counsel total loss with an ink of pen? Fine!books give us theories and ideas to mediate and ease our lamentations for moments but therapy doesn't work in a land full of ghosts and orphans! I screamed,rolled over and dramatized my pain in every way l could on top of the mountain but no one heard my loss. Six pieces of me gone l counted my trembling fingers as l looked at the dark sky. You see l didn't have to be told that my wife ,inlaws and three kids were dead,l just knew the very moment the rocks and water struck our house! The terrain of the slope of my in-laws' area of residence was way worse than where we lived although their farming lands were quite fertile. It was a vertically bumpy slope that meant if the rocks were ever to fall and the water to flood like it did,they undoubtedly were the most endangered of us all! I spent hours paranoid and thinking about why l didn't veto my family's decision to go to my in-laws' fields that particular day or atleast follow them to the cyclonic guillotine!
If this is how fate and destiny is then humanity will always indeed conform to the ripple effect of death! l sat through out the night holding my baby girl and interchanging between doing that and throwing cursing stones on the water near by but dawn took ages to come by! When morning finally set in and the sun rose,l saw in the rawest and brutal form what a cyclone was. Dictionaries say a cyclone is a storm or system of winds that rotates about a center of low atmospheric pressure, advances at high speeds and often brings heavy rain,landslides and earthquakes but if you ask me,a cyclone is a simple glimpse of hell itself! Mountains are humongous landmasses that project clearly above all if not most surroundings but the water had submerged 3/4 of the mountain's height and all of my village's biggest and tallest trees! I saw corpses float of different age groups and l covered my daughter's eyes with a piece of cloth l tore from the sweater before she woke up to protect her from further trauma.
Everything was gone, bridges made from the hardest and heaviest concrete and iron out there were floating like jellybeans in a 20 litre bucket! Sign posts of churches,market places ,police stations, Bibles, infant shoes,you name it! Everything floated away near the shore telling different stories of what had happened that previous day. When my princess eventually woke up,she was in pain due to her injuries and crying for me to open the blindfold but l had to torture and deny her that trauma. You see sometimes rights are overrated my friend,if you love someone unconditionally and you are able to save them from a future of insidious trauma then don't think twice about a temporary villain but a permanent hero! As human beings we have a glitch when it comes to right and wrong but sometimes doing the worst can be the right kind of good needed for the extremes of certain situations. I knew that the worst was to come and the irony of it all was that l couldn't do anything to stop it or so l thought! Food! Yes food my friend. You see grief and all kinds of life's realities can grip you but there is always a looming light and a looping time-line for hope but when hunger sets in,hyenas chew the bones! We were famished and in agony,two situations that humans always avoid to be in! Even in war,soldiers are told to live or die with a full stomach so that they have energy to carry their honor in this life or the next but what do you do when there is a hungry child and father with no means to provide relief? Do you beg the mountain for a slice of whatever it has to offer or fish in the blood of your fallen brothers?