As earlier said, my big challenges started after the demise of my
father, but events later shows, as the Bible says - Ps 34:19 Many
are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him
out of them all.Before my father died, plans had been made for my big sister (the
first born) to get married and so, when he eventually died, we
could not rip off the joy of the poor girl. So, we kept faithfully to
the plans.For the preparation of the wedding (after my father's burial at our
hometown), our maternal and paternal families were to meet and
the meeting took place at one of our maternal uncle's place (where
my sister was staying as at that time).The meeting was smooth and
okay, but there was an unfortunate statement made by one of my
paternal uncles that particular night and it was to work against me
later. The statement was that, “Se Sola? baba ti fa lemi lowo koto
ku” (meaning,“is it not Sola” Baba had handed him over to me
before he died”). I was happy that night because the statement
came from a well-to-do personality in the family, who even on the
wedding day personally donated a big cow on behalf of the family.After the wedding in which I acted as the father (at Nineteen), I
approached the man (my uncle), that I would like to move in with
him since he had just completed his house. He obliged and I leftThe man agreed to give us a room and immediately, I collected the
key and arranged a big truck that would pack our belongings at
once. Before then, our daughter had been taken to my sister. She
was barely three years old then. We then moved into the one room
and stock pilled our belongings while we created a bed space for
the two of us within the room. The bible says “All things work
together for good .............”.
Thank God the man allowed us to have the room which was
immediately beside his office. He did not know that we actually
were staying there and to our consternation, we found out that he
was actually a bilker for we were able to know what went on in that
office. People would come there to shout at him and after they had
left, he would start to curse them and say all sorts of things like
“they think I will give them the house” and so on.
Since people had started to occupy different parts of the building,
we had to scrutinize for ours too. Eventually, we got one and told
him about our findings. He then said that since the apartment was
not the one that we had paid for, we would have to part with an
extra N20 every month. We accepted the offer considering what
we had experienced already. The day we were moving our
belongings into the apartment was a theatrical one as somebody
(incidentally from our village) that had paid for the apartment
originally, showed up. Our short stay in that apartment was
eventful and dramatic as so many scenes followed and the man
disappeared. He went into hiding, we did not see him apart from
his wife, till we eventually packed out of the house.
Chapter Three