Suppers of Many Dishes

 

     Some of the children ate on the floor, others ate on the chairs.

The table was never too small for sharing in the joy of the many dishes from the eight mothers that we loved and cherished. Witness the joys of sharing  at supper, a tiny native chicken between a father, eight mothers and forty six little children all clustered on the floor and around a large oblong-shaped wooden center table;

 

   Witness the joys and fears of starting primary school at five, in a mud house missionary school with rusty brown corrugated iron roofing.

Witness the fascination and fears at getting sent off to live with a benevolent uncle in the city a hundred miles away as punishment for being pugilistic and unruly in the midst of the other forty five siblings and many neighbors’ children.

Imagine the evergreen memories of enrollment and attendance in an elite high school where unimaginable and unmitigated bullying and corporal punishment by seniors and school masters alike, competed with academic excellence for a pride of place.Relish the unforgettable and dazzling experiences of a fantasy-like childhood of an African child.

 

   Recoil at the tale of a brutal civil war which witnessed the transformation of the fateful childhood of a once promising high school student from one killing field of the civil war years to another, finally share in the fascinating glory of ultimate enrolment of the survivor into the nation’s premier medical school at the end of a thirty month brutal and devastating civil war; a bitter-sweet story based on true events that are like no other.