From Friends With Love...(1)

Well like I said two editions ago, I sat down to calculate my next move after I was told the best way to get support from people was to bring them to village for onsite experience and assessment so they could appreciate the herculean task I was saddled with.

My first target, naturally were my colleagues in the office. We had just started collective prayers online which we did using a WhatsApp group. At a point we discussed we should do a charity work as a catalyst to our prayers. I seized the opportunity to mention the village and painted the picture of the guinea worm infected child and the sorry sights I’d seen. They asked what they could do and I suggested they visit the village with me. We fixed a date in December!

Preparation was grand. My colleagues were so passionate about this. They suggested we should not go there empty-handed hence we contributed money to buy gifts (palliatives as it is now known). Anyway, the things we bought ranged from bags of rice, household detergents to bags of pure water and sanitary pads for women. Also, I implored them to check their houses for old clothes for adults and kids, shoes, bags, school bags or anything that they were no longer using but could still be of use to others. Not less than eight bags were gathered plus one hundred bags of sachet water. We were good to go.

Checking bags of gifts

We left in two SUVs and one Hilux truck on a Saturday morning. It was a long and tedious journey which was strange to my colleagues but which I was already used to. I drove in front and the other vehicles followed me. Luckily for us the rains had stopped and the stream was drying up hence it was easier to drive through. I could sense some uneasiness in my colleagues as we got to the first Village and I turned left into a thicker forest. I remember one of my colleagues asking me “are you sure there are people living where you are taking us to?” I turned and gave her a re-assuring smile.

Arrival at the village

We got to the village and packed under some trees. The villagers came out en masse and we started distributing the items. Two funny incidents occurred in the course of doing this. The first was a fight between two women over some of the items we were distributing. One grabbed it and the other snatched it. This led to a very bitter fight and at a time the two women were inseparable. The husband to one of them got involved and decided to scatter the good gesture from friends. When it appeared that this would lead to a community clash, we decided to suspend the palliative and return home. I must say a big thank you to my friend Uzoma for her tenacity at that point. She insisted we should not let a man disrupt our mission and deny the rest of the villagers of their blessings. We moved to the only primary school in the village and got the people more organized. The man came too and I had a pet talk with him and his response was that we allowed his wife to be battered while she was collecting her gift. We had to appease him with gifts for him and his wife. Only then were we able to continue the sharing of the gifts.  Well, we became friends till this day.

At the LEA Primary School, Gbaukuchi Village.

The second incident happened towards the end of our mission. We had finished sharing the rice and a very aged woman came with a walking stick. She could not talk very well and had lost most of her teeth. All she did was point to the rice someone else had collected signifying she wanted rice too. Well the rice had finished and we felt bad. One of us gave money to buy rice (an amount that could buy more than the quantity she would have got) but she collected the money, dropped it and pointed to the rice again.

These two incidents made my friends emotional. I could recall one of them said “imagine how the things we take for granted in the city matter a lot to these folks.” At the end of the visit, the villagers were extremely happy, particularly the children who got toys, sandals, clothes and school bags and the adults who got what most of them would later use as ceremonial wears.

My appreciation goes to Bukola Ogunleye, Martin Elugbaju, Emeka Igbeka, Adepegba Oduntan and Chris Olayinka who made the trip and the gesture possible. Special thanks to Uzoma Ekwebelem for her commitment and resolve to get everybody together for this cause. Special thanks to Saidu Abdullahi for his leadership, Solomon Aligweke for providing us with his Hilux truck to convey the goods; and to Danjuma too for lending his SUV. You guys wrote your name in gold in the hearts of the villagers.

When we got to the office the following week, it was with sober hearts that all my colleagues then, called me for a meeting and asked in specific terms “what do the villagers need most for now…?”

Friends with large hearts