DESPAIR
This is the time of year when schoolchildren write exams. In our school, due to the limited number of candidates, we decided to team up with another school to write the junior high exams.
So I was privileged to take the students to the center where they will write, so every morning I have to take them to the school until they are done writing for the day so as to bring them back to their original school. I always stays in the school bus drivers office who is in his late 70s.
It was on Wednesday when I was about to go back to our school with the kids when, after the day's exam, I spoke in my local language in my dialect (Igbo). The man recognized my dialect and asked where I was from, and it turns out that we are from the same tribe, which increases our friendship.
The next day, which is Thursday, we happen to be alone in his office. Based on his troubled heart, I just felt that he wanted to talk to someone, though I don't like getting involved in another man's business. The man started with an injury he got eight years ago while working for the school. He said he drove the proprietor to a city called Umuhia in Nigeria, left him there to spend time with his family, and when the proprietor was done with his activity there, he went back to drive him. So as the old man was on a public transport to his boss to resume his duty, he was involved in an accident, a frontal collision with another vehicle, which took the lives of three passengers, but he survived with his life hanging on a thread, because on getting to the hospital he got 18% of blood remaining in his body, but the accident took the right leg, though he still managed to walk with it.
The old man also has a dislocation on his wrist from trying to protect the school property; currently, his body is totally disoriented. The worst thing that can break a man down is family, he said. His two boys fought in front of him after our encounter, Making matters worse, the school asked his two boys to leave the premises and never come back because the school gave them accommodation on the premises. He cried to me that he had failed as a father; his boys are living a wayward and irresponsible lifestyle. Though he still loves them, since the school denies his kids, they have also denied him because they are family.
He bend in despair and said; his wife have been helpful but she is sick and have not traveled back to work for up to a month, as the case may be he might go down to the trenches to find a cheap accomodatione, as he was about to continue his wife came in.