The girls’ hostel was just across the road on the other side of the school, meaning it wasn’t far from the boys’ hostel. Also, just adjacent to the girls’ hostel, there was a filling station that was usually open during the day, even on the weekend.
On this day, we started our cleaning, and what we do usually was to pack all the debris at the waste site and burn it. We would wait until the debris was completely done before we headed back to the hostel, so that we would prevent the fire outbreak. Same as the debris at the boys’ hostel, and that’s because we had no borehole in our hostel, so we would fetch enough water from the three wells around us to quench the fire.
We did the cleaning, burnt the debris and returned to our dormitories with so much peace that soon turned into chaos.
Fire! Fire! We heard screams from outside. The fire that we thought we had quenched, rekindled so fast, that it burnt like it was the end of the world. The reason? It was the dry season.
We had teachers who had farms within the school, and it was caught up in the fire. Everything burnt to the ground.
We did try to quench the fire once again, but it felt like, the more we tried, the more it gained power, but we didn’t relent. We kept fetching from the wells praying fervently that we do not reach the end of the wells on that day because that would be the end of our school and hostel.
While we were running to put out the fire, it kept rekindling and that’s because everywhere was dry, so it was easy for the fire to catch anything and everything. Gradually, it moved close to the filling station.
We tried, oh, we tried. We ran, fetched water, and the filling station workers also joined in. they were lucky because they had borehole, so it was easy to fetch from there, but, soon they finished fetching from the borehole. The fire was at the back of the filling station now.
At this point, passers by had gathered. People had parked their cars to help put out the fire, because any mistake, the filling station would catch fire, and it would be fatal.
After many hours of efforts, the fire quenched, but not after it destroyed a part of the filling station where there was no fuel, and that felt better.
By the time the fire was quenched, all of us could sit down, and appreciate God and the efforts of the people who had come to help. However, the deed was done.
Our school kiosk was burnt, but for the fact that it was opened, it saved a lot of the products inside.
As for the farms that burnt down, the teachers had to start from the beginning after counting their losses. Even though it was sad, they did well not asking who started the fire, because it was nobody’s fault that it happened.
For the filling station, in about three months, they had finished the reconstruction of the burnt part of the station.
As for us, the students, the trauma didn’t let us leave the debris burning site until we were certain that the debris was fully burnt, and that the water had quenched the fire properly.
This is my entry to InLeo prompt for the month of February. You can find the details here