Picture Credit: Snapshots from a Life
I was ten and my excitement knew no bounds.
My Mom had just informed us that we would be going back to Mwala, Kenya where I’d spent a good part of my younger years growing up with Mwaitu, my maternal Grandmother. Some of my very best memories come from the vast fields back there, with my siblings and cousins and the scrapes we got up to back then. My parents had even bought us brand new sandals from Bata for the trip. My 10-year old joy was completely without measure, expansive, boundless.
Even when my Mom explained that we were going to say Goodbye to Mwaitu, it didn’t really register. I was just so HAPPY. It didn’t register.
We flew to Kenya from Nigeria, and drove to Mwala. Oh the vast expanse of yellow-green grass (or lack of) and the sparse short-short trees on the way to the village. I’d missed it so so much. It was great seeing everyone again. Everyone had changed, the place seemed different, somehow smaller than I remembered, and the children could not get enough of each other’s stories from two different cultures. The adults had to force us to sleep those nights. I’d missed herding and milking the goats and roasting corn in the fields of Mwala, sitting by the village’s local lake. I wanted to do everything once again before we had to leave, and the time was so short.
One night, I burst into the kitchen. In the village, the kitchen was almost separate from the main building.
I’d absent-mindedly noticed that the adult women gathered with Mwaitu there in the evenings, and for some reason we were not allowed in there at those times. I had forgotten. I can never forget.
All the women turned at once, my Mom shouting frantically for me to get out, Mwaitu saying gently, “…It’s ok, let her come in…”… I was transfixed. I wasn’t sure I was alive, or in a dream…Where Mwaitu’s breast was supposed to be was a massive open flesh wound. All the time we’d been there Ah-Ah… how could she have been so in pain, and yet so calm and happy that her last-born and Nigerian grandchildren had come back home to see her.
Then I remembered my Mom saying we were going back to say Goodbye to Mwaitu, and tears welled up in my eyes.
I cried for Mwaitu before she died. That was the night I first heard the word Cancer.
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