Midnight Echoes (ONLY PREVIEW)

Chapter 1

"Our fingerprints don't fade from the lives we've touched."
~Will Fetters
--

Abuja. April, 2013.

The IDP camp was a mess. A gut-wrenching stench coming from the impromptu gutters, enveloped the air. Thick, black flies swatted from one littered bowl to another, and from one malnourished child to another. A lone fly momentarily made its way to a fresh boil on a boy's knee, and sucked the liquid from it. The boy, who was dozzing off on the bare floor, jerked from his slumber, chased the fly away with a wave of his hand, and continued to doze off, without a care in the world. Black smoke rose from behind the tents, to the sky above, clouding the atmosphere.

The morning sun had just risen over the horizon. It was a little past eight, but it seemed like the camp had started burstling with the activities of the day hours before then. Thousands of men, women, and children of various ages were splattered in different corners of the small camp. It was clear, that there was way too many refugees for such a small camp.

As the medical bus finally found the closest parking space to the tents, so did the little group of kids that had been excitedly following it also halt. Some of the kids would cup their faces with with their hands and press their foreheads against the bus' glass windows, and giggle excitedly. Or they would excitedly trace the alphabets on the vehicle, wondering what meaning the words, 'UNIVERSITY OF ABUJA TEACHING HOSPITAL', beheld

The camp was extremely noisy. From the clanking of pots and cooking utensils, to the chatters of innocent children. From the bawling wails of hungry kids and the noisy telling off from frustrated mothers, to the conversations of elderly men sitted on shipskins and tattered mats all combined to fill the atmosphere with unbearable noise. A thin woman, who was sat on a mat under the shade of a tent was breastfeeeding a skeletal-looking child. The woman closed her eyes briefly and then let out a piercing screem, and almost instantly, begun to wail loudly. The baby on her lap let go of her shrunken breasts and broke down. Yet, no one, including the children playing dara by her side payed the slightest attention to her. It looked like this was a regular routine here, like the refugees had grown used to it.

Finally, the bus' door bursted open, and almost immediately, the kids jerked backward, as if they had suddenly been strucked with the most fearful genie. They watched, as men, and women, -all wearing a knee-length white clothes over their various clothes -hopped down from the bus. And then silently, each one of the kids, started to take a step backward, and another, and another, until they sprinted far away from the bus, and away from it's people.

"Well, that was weird." Dr. Ayo, one of the persons from the bus said. He was one out of the few corp members who was visiting the IDP camp for the first time.

"I suppose." Another responded.

"I am not surprised." Another corp member said in a grim voice.

"Oh.. why?" Miss Funke asked the corp member unsurely, as if she was scared to ask him. She was a lab technician who had volunteered to come and immunize the kids. It had been her job, before she got a job at the teaching hospital, to go from house to house, administering polio vaccines to children.

"I suppose they expected something more from us. Probably food." The young man responded confidently. Miss Funke couldn't agree more. It only made sense that children here would expect food from people, not vaccines, not immunizations, not education. Hunger was perhaps the only visible disease here.

"Eh? Dr. Surash, because we are 'father christmas' abi?" Ayo remarked. The young man did not reply. Instead, he adjusted his tie, pulled out his handgloves from his labcoat's pocket, and begun to wear them. His gesture suggested he had zero tolerance for people like Ayo. Yet, he looked like someone who was used to being ridiculed because of his ideologies.