We are all fractured. All of us. And we are lonely. It seems like we are all battling some sort of inadequacies that I’m not equipped to comprehend. The emails I have continued to receive point to this. Most are extreme in nature. One was from a suicidal lady: “Have you ever locked yourself in your house for a week and your phone never rings even once? Not once, Biko! That happened to me as I write this, and I’ve been battling suicidal thoughts.” Then the lady who believes if she just loses weight she will get a man and new friends. Then a man whose son died and he has grieved the way men grieve – by being men. But he’s finally cracking. They all write because they need an avenue, plus I’m a stranger. I also think they write because they need help.
I’m don’t know what help I can offer, I’m unequipped. I need to know if out there is someone, an organisation, a group that deals with such things. If you are that person or you know someone, could you please provide an email address so that you can be contacted directly for this?
This is the last email story I’m publishing as a spinoff of last week’s story. I’m publishing it because it’s beautifully written, it’s conflicted and it’s tender. There are words that leap out of this story: “I hate life mostly, because I’m poor….and my parents are poor because of 2007 [post election] clashes….” The author would like to remain anonymous.
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By Anonymous
It is 2000 hours. I am seated before my Dell latitude/E6400, beside me is a techno H5, can you imagine that? In this era when everyone else is having an Infinix, I have a H5!
Well, since everyone is confessing, I will confess too. I am the girl who writes stories about my patients (I am a medical student, sixth year). I write about mothers whose children have big heads. I write about the sadness in their eyes, about the shame that they feel ( shrug shoulders at this point), about the eyes shot at them, and the tons of sympathy they receive from people who either can but won’t help them, and from those who can’t help. I write about smiling toddlers who have been abandoned in casualty benches because they have embarrassing conditions, conditions like hydrocephalus, spine bifida, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and many many others. I write about teenagers who inherited HIV from their parents, about their struggle with tablets and injections and the attitudes of nurses and doctors and watchmen and medical students and everyone. I write about old men, whose sperms have fertilized thirteen ova (eggs), who are dying of esophageal cancer in the wards because they have no sons to pay for endoscopy. I also write about those women who bleed to death while bringing a life to earth, woe unto those tiny pink things born of mothers who have died of postpartum hemorrhage. Sometimes I also write about university, and how brown skin, big ass and great sex is equivalent to first class, woe unto us dark skinned bottomless chicks.
I hate life mostly, because I am poor, and I have one ovary and hirsutism and acne. And my parents are poor courtesy of 2007 clashes. I am working hard so that I can build my family a house before the current one collapses on them,( so help me God, I want to be done this year, kuna ku-repeat med school by the way, but that is not my portion-amen). I want to finish school so that I can afford compression stockings for my foot, and so that I can start anything, something to help poor Kenyans with health information. I want to educate people on the need for insurance and the need for maternity clinics and how to avoid congenital anomalies. I will have a blog (revive my current one), and a column, and a radio programme and a television programme.
I live for that one dream, and for a boy, this boy loves me and I love him. I love his dreams; he might marry me (if he won’t mind that I have only one ovary left). I love his dreams and he also writes though on a smaller scale, and about the village mostly (people don’t like village stories). He lives somewhere in Nairobi, works for a Mhindis, owns a china phone and a stove and a bed and a radio. He went to a fake college (I don’t tell him his college is fake), and didn’t graduate because he had fee arrears. He has a grand dream, he even listens to Jay-z’s Victory, and one man can change the world and others. He writes songs and raps, but of course he is uko dooooown in the music ladder, and he comes from the village first then the ghetto, so you can guess what his life will be like.
I don’t want him to die with his dreams and songs and niiice bass. Write him an email, elimelechbarnabass@gmail .com, and please listen to his song, I will send you one in whatsapp if you are willing (by the way I have your number, took it on that day when we invited you to a whatsapp group for writers).
Pray for me also, because I have to finish school.