She is a mother of 2 lovely girls. Together with her husband who did just about any kind of menial job he could find they lived a hard but tolerable life as they perched, albeit illegally in the general area of the Odaw River near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle. She on the other hand is an industrious woman who cooked and sold Banku and Kokonte to the dwellers on their filth infested man-made slum.
This was a family full of hope, believing they could turn their circumstances around and improve their livelihood through hardwork. Little did they know, that life as they knew it at the time, was the best they could ever taste.
It was a cold rainy evening, the mother and her two children were hiding in their make shift wooden structure of a house, perched on the bank of the Odaw River. The mother had clutched her children close to her blossom, to give them a sense of safety and love and also to provide them warmth as the elements of the weather seemed to be working against them with stark alacrity.
The father had gone out to make ends meet..and was racing home when he observed the rains were increasing in intensity and didn’t look like it was ending soon, he knew all too well the dangers his family was in if the rains persisted. Neither the torrential downpour lashing out at his face, nor the fact that he was drenched to the skin could prevent him from getting home against all odds.
He arrived to a horrific scene!. His house like some others was sinking in the waters. He waded in the rising floods that were then at waist level and got closer, he dared not open the door! He luckily found some young boys too who were willing to help. They climbed the roof of the house and beheld the sad scene of a mother who had climbed onto barrels, tearfully carrying her two children as the waters quickly rose to catch up with them. He lowered sticks down through a hole and managed to get his family out of the house!. Once he got them to safer grounds he commanded his wife, much like how God commanded Lot’s family to escape and never look back. Only this woman looked back as she ran to the police station nearby, she didn’t however become a pillar of salt, but a statue of sorrow. It was as she ran to the police station that she heard the loud boom! as a filling stations exploded in fire like Sodom and Gomorrah, she covered her children’s faces from seeing the rain of fire as she sped on!
The man had climbed a tall mango tree in the vicinity and hid in it. Watching, waiting, shivering, wailing, willing that somehow the rains will recede and he will count his losses. Alas it never was!
This woman returned when a bit of tense calm and astounded silence had engulfed the area. She was hoping to run and embrace her hero of a husband who had saved them. Only problem is their house was no.longer there! There was no sign a house was once present there, her kokonte shop and utensils has vanished, wiped away clean. She looked up at the mango tree where her love had hidden….she stared into a blank sky as the tree along with its stem and it’s branches along where her husband, her hero, had been completely wiped out of exstence by the waters!.
I know you had hoped for a better ending, God knows I hoped for a happy ending too, but some stories never end sweetly…this is one of those. All I can do now is to help take care of this woman and her children, counsel her, resettle them and give her a source of sustenance as she battles the tragedy of a lifetime. This is the bitter memory of June 3 that some people carry, people I have been working with and hoping to keep assisting. When you pray today, pray for a victim or a survivor of the June 3 disaster. May this Hero of a man resthat peacefully with the Lord. Wipe your tears, roll up your sleeves and let’s help the living and help prevent this from ever happening again. I wish he at least had a grave, where we can lay the epitaph “here lays a man of varlour, who stood for his family to the very end”.
