Unconditional Love

Maria brought a tin lamp and placed it on the table. It was the only source of light in the house. She affectionately bade her first born child goodnight and disappeared behind an old ruched curtain where her daughter Viviane was fast asleep. She peeped from behind the curtain and saw that he was completely lost in books, unperturbed by the tin lamp’s flickering flame and surly obscene shouts of night merry-makers outside. 

Her husband had been an officer in the ministry of works but died ten years ago.  Since then, she was yet to receive a coin of his death benefits or even the monthly widow’s pension, and her visits to the pensions department were always met with indifference, hostilities and sugar-coated promises. Two months ago, she eventually accepted the fact that her husband’s money was gone with the wind, when an official at the Pensions office told her that her husband’s file could not be traced—in short, it was lost and without it, no coin could be paid. It was time to look elsewhere if her two children were to eat.

If there was any hope left in her life, then it was in her two children. She was jobless and sick, and should anything happen, she trusted her son would be good to his sister. Staring secretly at him as he studied on the small table, her eyes lit up with admiration in their yellowness and sure as eggs is eggs, she knew he won’t fail her. She had always seen that bright future whenever she looked into his eyes.

No sooner had she turned on the mattress cover stuffed with gunny bags to face the mud wall and force some sleep, than disturbing sounds began filtering in from the other side through the gaps on the carton-covered wall. She could tell that her neighbor Pamela was entertaining a guest in her room. From the loud snoring, she believed that her daughter was deeply asleep. But the son was still at the table, the irritating moans notwithstanding; he had become accustomed to the neighbor’s kind of profession. Personally, he wanted to become a medical doctor, specializing in neurosurgery. After winning a scholarship, he had reached a resolution not to let his immediate environment smother his dream. He would just assume everything and wait for time to fly.

Living in the ghetto required that one doesn’t take to heart everything the eyes and ears perceive. Another undisputed rule was that those fond of suffering culture shock could never make good residents of a ghetto, because once within its confines, etiquette becomes a reserve of the souls found in those leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, perimeter walls, running tap water, sewerage services, security and electricity.

Maria burned with guilt when her son eventually opened the door and left, apparently too embarrassed to be experiencing such an act in his mother’s presence. It was a familiar occurrence and she knew he was seated outside under the only security light in the expansive slum, reading his books and risking his life all in the name of getting an education and dodging poverty. A sympathetic community developer had erected the tall lighting tower to discourage gun totting criminals who ruled the slum day and night, raping women old enough to be their mothers and snuffing life and property out of innocent victims, in total disregard of the fact that they were all soldiers of the same struggle.

A deep groan from Pamela’s room reminded Maria that she had no moral ground on which to stand and judge her neighbor. She too, besides washing people’s clothes for a little pay, traded her body for material gain. But what was one to do, alone and with children to take care of? Life had proved itself harder than ever before and like they say, man must live or perhaps, survive. Putting a simple meal of ugali and sukumawiki on the table was a herculean task in itself for one person, what about two extra mouths to feed? It was all about circumstances. If anything, which sane person could wish for such a life?

The tin lamp finally went out after running out of the five shillings worth of adulterated paraffin bought at a local shop. Unknown to many, what they thought to be paraffin was actually a mixture of the highly flammable petrol siphoned from car parks and a little paraffin. Consequently, exploding stoves was a common phenomenon resulting in loss of homes, deaths and life-long scars.

Her gaze darted in the room’s darkness. She hated to doubt if her children would overcome the ghoul of poverty that had the audacity to majestically walk over the generation fence and eat them up. Albeit everybody was screaming themselves hoarse, preaching how education was necessary to win the war against poverty, it was slowly but surely becoming common knowledge among the masses that education was no longer the principal elevator to a good life. In the country, it was obvious that what mattered in one securing employment was whom you knew and not what you knew. She thought it was outrageous that somebody could struggle through school, draining his family’s resources along the way only to end up with nothing to show for it all. And their crime? Not knowing someone who could connect them to the high voltage power lines.

She knew of scores of young men and women who did odd manual jobs in the slum and yet they were university graduates. Could you accuse them of not having tried enough? And what would you have to say of some evil secretaries who are known to shred irreplaceable academic certificates of desperate job seekers? Apparently, illicit cheap liquor appeared the only agreeable way to go for those graduates who couldn’t stomach the unfair sight of their dreams and sweat going up in a plume of smoke not because they are lazy, but because the system had failed and cannot accommodate them.

Maria had an acquaintance who her sparkling resume notwithstanding, in order to supplement her little income that could barely pay rent and keep the family of four in shape till the next payday, had resorted to discreetly engaging in the oldest profession. This she did not because she enjoyed the company of men she barely knew, but because she was concerned about her children walking around with protruding stomachs and saving her ever-sloshed husband the embarrassment of walking around without undergarments, even if already enjoyed by a European.

She wondered if children raised up in slums ever stood a chance in life. As others believed, around was an environment only fit for raising gangsters and twilight girls. How could someone expect monks and nuns to sprout out of households where the rudiments of proper parenting ranked with dinosaurs on the timeline? Since parents had shown their competence in blazing the trail of immorality, then their children literally had no future to look forward to because no society is alive without a sense of morality that is dearly treasured and held onto the hearts of its members in a jealous guard.

By the time he came back, she was feeling dopey. She could hear him grope in the darkness, shoving the few items in the room to create a sleeping space on a mat. Though her eyes felt heavy with sleep, she didn’t forget to pray. Religion was the only consolation for those souls wallowing in poverty because where there was religion, there was still hope; where there was religion, there was still possibility; where there was religion, there was life. Sitting up, she prayed that someday in the foreseeable future, her kids and their likes all over the world will break the ground and rise against the myriad challenges of their upbringing, blotted with innocent plays in grungy playgrounds littered with used French letters and syringes. She clenched her feeble palms into small tight fists hoping in her prayer that a day to come, those children will break loose from their ugly pasts; that somehow in the future, these children will look beyond the open secret that their mothers had to sell their bodies for them to feed and clothe.

Finally, she fell into the irresistible arms of Morpheus, full of hopes that her own children will defy all odds and grow up into a respectable successful man and woman, although dusted and disgusted in the elementary stages of life.