I used to read and hear stories about flood destroying houses, displacing things and even, sometimes, causing déaths, and although these are realities, they had, for me, existed and remained realities only in the stories I heard them.
But today, this reality drove with a truckload of agonies into my compound, and for the first time in my life, I saw flood and experienced its effect of merciless violénce. Or I should say I only saw its effect, because I was still at the Good Friday Mass when the very unfriendly rains that caused everything, as if after a very long period of hum and haw, finally decided to punish the earth for some kind of sins it had committed against it, came.
I have been deeply shaken and disoriented by grief since I came back from Mass this evening. The flood floored two houses which, for long, had been standing inside the gable of our own building.
And as I type this, three children are currently missing. That was what I was able to filter from the moody voices of the influx of people already talking amongst themselves when I stepped in. Three children. All from the same mother. Those who spoke of it said the children were drowned and taken away by the flood.
Bad things happening to the good is really bad.
I know the mother of those three drowned children. Very good mother. Very hardworking mother. Inspite of the fact that she alone, all along, had been responsible for making sure that all three children have things with which to live life well, she had never allowed the stressfulness that came with it to impinge on her.
This evening when she flew into the compound to see that both her house and her children were gone, she just stayed there, in loud silence, hovering around the spot where she had painstakingly weaved her nest.
It was today I saw that even animals have emotions. I saw tears dropped from her eyes, from the mother's eyes, from the bird's eyes.
Today, suffering visited her house with its own stool and took away everything she had — her house, her three children and her hope.
THIS IS NO FICTION