Bitter Pill

Annually, malaria kills as many as 700,000 African children under the age of five. God bless the World Health Organization and the myriads of NGOs, who supply us with mosquito nets which reduce the spread of the disease. But as no one spends all his life under the nets, we still get bitten by mosquito and contract the dreaded malaria fever. I actually fancy the thought that mosquitoes are nocturnal insects which started running daytime shifts just to suck our blood; because most of us are safely tucked under the nets at night. Every now and then, when preventive measures like mosquito nets fail, we recourse to curative ones.

One very common cure, back in the day, was Quinine – the bitterest substance I have ever tasted since birth. For the life of me, I still don’t understand why there were no sugar-coating or sweetened variants! There was the Quinine syrup for kids and Quinine tablets for adults, but everyone hated them. From children to parents, doctors to patients the drug was abhorred, but it was the only thing that could cure malaria. Uptown kids, like my wife, were encouraged by parents to drink it by promising a treat, say a bottle of Fanta, for downing the face-contorting, tears-evoking potion. But for people leaving on the other end of town, such as yours truly, there were no positive inducers like Fanta or ice-cream.

I too know

I have often been nicknamed ITK; that’s short for ‘I too know’. It means someone who is supposed to be a storehouse of information. It’s not an entirely positive word or even a compliment because it connotes some degree of conceitedness. Whenever I am called ITK, I retort with some angry criticism until I overdid it at an open day.

I accompanied a friend to visit his daughter in elementary school. The pupils were all happy to see us and on sighting us Titi, my friend’s daughter, ran towards him with open arms as he gathered her in a tight embrace. She greeted me too with a beautiful grin and handed me some mock paper money. I was about to thank her for the generosity when her class teacher walked up and asked her to tell us how she made the money.

12 Eons a Slave

As we drove off, my wife and I looked at each other and shook our heads. From the reflection of the street lamps on her face, I caught a tear-drop sliding down her cheek. She shook her head again and remarked with a tinge of pain in her voice, “We all are hypocrites!”