WHAT ABOUT THEM?

"Thank you Uncle Ahmad, okay bye bye, please do send my regards to the family" I said and dropped the phone. I was on the line to my uncle who called from England asking after mother who happened to be absent at the time. Uncle Ahmad was mother's older brother; he was the oldest and she the youngest, although it was just the two of them to their parents who were both late. He asked me to let her know of his plan to come home with his family after nineteen years.

I lived in Mushin, a local government area in Lagos state, Nigeria with my parents and siblings. Among the kids I was the oldest, followed by two beautiful twin sisters called Nafisa and Nusaiba which then after them was a boy called Ayman. We lived very close to a lagoon where we would stroll out to on the days we get bored or tired of doing the same thing.

Nafisa and Nusaiba were final year students at the University of Lagos, Nafisa studied English literature and was hoping to be an educationist, author or poet someday. She had an achievement during her second year at the university for the best well-spoken student of the year. Nusaiba on the other hand studied Arts; she had always had a passion for paint and colours. Even as a child, she would paint the walls with her crayons and act like it was some kind of competition, she destroyed every white wall in the house as far as her height could reach. Nusaiba also had an achievement but was different to that of her twin because she had always been awarded for the best and neatest artiste from her first year until the last.

Ayman was still in primary school. Elementary school as the people abroad would refer to it, he did not like to go to school, in the mornings when one of the twins would come and prepare him for school, he would cry, fidget and scream until everyone woke up. He was a bright child as his teacher suggested to mother, she said he only needed to be less pampered because it seemed like he was too attached and used to being pampered.

I was a graduate at the University of Lagos which by my people was popularly known as uniLag. I studied electrical electronics, after which I served at the NYSC camp in Kubwa, Abuja. The capital of my great country Nigeria. NYSC stands for National youth service corps, every Nigerian graduate was expected to go through this process where we would be trained and tested before actually getting a job. Usually they would post youth to various communities to teach, lecture or work in companies for a job experience. Few out of the youth sent out to serve were retained at their supposed work places and unfortunately for me, I had not fallen into that category.

"Maryam, you would have to go out there and attempt fending for yourself, you are not getting any younger" I cautioned myself.

After camp, I rented an apartment for a night which I had viewed days before I did, in one of the satellite towns around Abuja called Lugbe; it was of course far from the main city where I had planned on going in search of a job. I did not actually rent an apartment, I rented a room in a U-shaped building which had a courtyard and an entrance with no gate, in the compound there were twenty four rooms with ten facing each other and four on their own. This kind of building was what we called face me I face you in my country. There was practically no roofed kitchen, it was only a corner filled with tied stack of fire wood and traditional pots that looked like a metallic ball that had been scraped off its top part and beneath it were stands that looked as if some clay was moulded into little fat sticks and pasted under the pot. It had a metallic handle too. In that same compound we were expected to share toilets and bathrooms with the opposite gender. It was not what I wanted but then I shrugged.

"Oh well, you do not have a choice, learn the hard way" I said to myself.

As I walked towards the compound, I looked around and there was a sign on the wall that read.

BA FITSARI A NAN

It was written in burnt faded orange paint and in bold. It meant do not urinate here, although it was not written in my native language, I had friends who spoke the language which was known as Hausa, one of the three main languages in the country. As i walked further, there was a huge crowd of okada men arguing and talking in various languages that I had never heard before.