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Let someone else please tell me if there is truly something the matter with me. My husband says there is but I don’t believe him – he studied history not psychology. His attempt to psycho-analyse me started when I went hunting for a freezer. He does not think we need yet another freezer for bread! But I think we do. Where will we put all that bread and I don’t want any of it to spoil. There is no scarcity of flour or dough but I have this lovely girl, I mean very pretty young girl who comes to sell bread to me without fail every morning. I don’t eat bread myself and my children don’t like Agege bread so unless we have guests come in who want Agege bread to eat or take away I have to store all those extra loaves in the freezer so they do not spoil. NEPA, sorry PHCN stopped giving us light since December and I have had to buy extra diesel to ensure that the bread does not go bad. This is the second freezer I need for the bread so on a level, I understand why my husband is beginning to complain. But he of all people should understand that I need the freezer! And some more diesel because power is still out. I hope I am not confusing you, I need the freezer not the bread, but I want the freezer for the bread. Simple. Yes, I know the girl has me tagged, I am a standard sales of 2 loaves a day for her, a quick N120 in the kitty. Means little to me but makes a world of difference to her. When I come out to buy my two loaves the other mai gadis also come around to buy. I encourage them to buy and offer to pay most times. So the number of mai gadis who come round to buy bread at my gate has increased dramatically over the past year and the half. My husband started to get testy when I refused to leave for an appointment one day because the girl had not shown up to make her daily sale of bread at my gate. I don’t know where she lives, understandably I don’t want to know because even I know that I have a bad case of it this time. What is it? My sister calls it project time. A good-looking face, male or female, and a sob story gets me going all the time. I am simply a sucker for it. This little girl of about 11 (she does not know how old she is) who looks uncannily like a childhood friend, was brought from some village up country to live with her aunty in town. A tray of bread was put on her head as soon as she got into town but that was no strange thing for her because she did exactly the same thing in her home village, only it was smoked groundnuts, but she had a lot less to eat than now. Also here she has a pair of slippers, when she lived with her own mother she had none, she did not even have a second dress or panties. When she washed her dress then she tied her mother’s scarf round her waist and stayed around the house while it dried but that happened very infrequently so it did not matter. She likes that she lives with her aunty now. They cook with a stove, better than firewood, which she used to go out to gather. She also gets to take a bath every other day here, and she has three dresses and this pair of slippers her aunty bought when she arrived and insists that she wears everywhere. They have become shorter than her feet, when she got them last year there was space to spare. She takes especial care of them when she is in this estate because the roads are tarred and she can walk barefoot and carry her slippers in her tray of bread. That was one of the many reasons she likes to come into the estate. Another was that she could stay all day resting(?) in the shades of the trees.
All the guards know her so they don’t bother her much, some even give her money to buy food and snacks off the other hawkers that come around, some of the hawkers were her friends too. The part she likes best is watching the children in that house play with their scooter and their bicycles. They even have very clean water in a hole in the ground to play in. The children are always so shiny, they don’t talk to her but she likes them very much. They leave their house very early, which is another reason she likes to come into the estate early too, so she can watch them drive out in that big car, three of them sitting in the back. In her very innocent child’s mind, which is so rare today, she does not want to be like them, she just likes to watch them. They are not allowed to go out to play with other children and there is always a woman watching over them. No that woman is not their mother she knows their mother she had seen her. Their mother goes out in another fine car, shorter than the children’s car but it is a fine car too. The woman that is always with the children shoos her away whenever she came too close to their gate. No she does not want to go to school, when she tried to go in their village, they spent all the time on the teacher’s farm. Her father had insisted that the whole schooling thing was a ploy to put the children into slavery that is why she was sent to her aunty in town, she will learn a trade when she is old enough but she must earn some money first. Her aunty told her that the bread is her own investment, the profit will be used to pay for her to learn a trade. She does not know yet what she wants to learn, her aunty sells beans but you don’t need to learn that, anyone can cook beans. This little girl and her easy chatter gets me. She is a happy child, blissfully unaware. I cannot begin to tell her of the dangers she was exposed to, staying in the estate all day long in the company of guards. Horror of horrors, what if the worst happened? I don’t have the words to explain, she is so unspoilt. I am afraid of what I might find if I follow her home, I don’t want added responsibility –financial and emotional – or complications in my life yet I want her to make that money quickly so she can become apprenticed quickly. I am not against her not wanting to go to school, she has had her experience and gained nothing by it. The public schools in Lagos are no different, the children go to learn only vices. Is she a victim of child labour, is she a trafficked child? I have made no investigations, but I don’t think so. The child is happy. She has been told about plans for her future, she is at peace with it. She does not even want to be like the rich children that she has seen. She just likes to look at them, they are shiny.
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Posted by Robot| 13.08.2006 11:56