The conference had ended and everyone had left, inspired. As I sat on the luxury bed of that five-star hotel, I was grateful to God for his mercies. Every participant in that women’s conference had gone home with a determination in their hearts to positively influence their world. Women also had a right to be nation transformers. The kingly treatment or the honorarium that I received was not the source of my joy. My happiness was anchored in the conviction in the hearts of my listeners to aspire for greatness via service. But how did an abused, rejected fellow like me rise to be a beacon of hope and a lighthouse to the weary sailor in the stormy seas of life.
If we all had a chance to choose our parents, I would have been the beloved daughter of a duke, brought up in a splendid castle. But I was born an orphan in an isolated clan. So short was my father’s lifespan. Dying in order to bring me into this world wasn’t in my mother’s plan. Before he died, Mazi Okenna – my grandpa’s younger brother – told me that on that day, there was no celebration that a girl child had been born. Instead of a treasure to be cherished, I was a liability to be borne. Hearing it was so painful. A meeting was summoned and I – who was less than a month old – was the main agenda. No one wanted to take me in. They all had enough mouths to feed. Being the head of our extended family, he commanded his first son, Udemba, to take me in. That settled it. Even in his first son’s house, I was treated as an osu – an outcast.
On the threshold of adolescence, I was taken away to the city by people I never knew before that dreadful day. In a place illuminated by electricity, I was lost. With the dawn of puberty came the forceful deflowering of my maidenhead by my guardian’s husband. Darkness was a time of terror, for he subsequently abused me sexually every night with a rag in my mouth to stifle my midnight cry. Alas, amidst the busyness of city life, I had no one to trust; deep inside, I was all alone.
Palm kernels – eaten together with friends in the village – gave strength to the body and health to the bones, than spoilt food heated over a stove. I was so depressed that I lost the taste of food, the freshness of clean water and the touch of grass. I was naked in the dark. It was more cheerful to pitch tent in a graveyard than hang around me. Finally I had to run away from home…. No! Was that home? It was just a shelter. Home is in my heart.
What really happened that turned my life around I can’t say. Just as a man can’t say how much weight he added from a particular meal, so also I couldn’t lay my finger on one particular incident. But one of the most crucial was when I discovered that even if I had lost everything, I still had the power to choose. I chose to forgive all that had hurt me. It wasn’t romantic.
I chose to be that oasis in the desert for that weary traveller who was beginning to believe he couldn’t make it in the journey called life. Through faith in God and confidence in myself, I slowly but gradually arose from the dunghill like a light awakening from the ashes, like fire tempered from smoldering coals. Now, the once hopeless now dispenses hope.
I needed to unlearn the evil that pain had taught me. I had to learn new things in order to become a new person. I learnt God’s mathematics: Joy adds and multiplies as you divide it with others.
When I told Ezinne, my best friend, my story, after a long pause she said, “Ifunanya, God will mend even a broken heart if we give him all the pieces.” And that was what I did. I gave him my heart and he made it whole again. Now, the shadows of the past doesn’t hurt me anymore, rather it makes me believe that I can be an agent of change to the needy around me. After all, only a physician who has suffered the same disease as his patient will fully understand the extent of the pain….
I kept thinking about all these until sleep wrapped its warm blanket around me.
The next day after the conference, I flew back to the orphanage I managed. Nothing gladdened my heart like the smiles on their faces as they cried, “mummy” when they saw me. Me, who had no mother.
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