Agush Nyang

YWAA GORO

I had been a poor performer in school since form 1, it was known(I immediately think of that Game of Thrones scene where the two maids are attending to Dany as she soothes her dragon eggs on fire and gets burned, barely, and they tell her all about the myths and misconceptions about dragons and dragon eggs, and how it is known that dragons were killed and are extinct, it is known). But there was this one teacher, madam Beatrice ogola, who used to encourage me and tell me if I really put my head into it, I could really be a good performer. She could see my potential and believed I can turn around my grades, but being constantly chased away for fees now and then didn’t help her case, but at least I was in school, boarding and away from the horrors of home. Primary school had been free, largely, and the school uniforms, miscellaneous fees, etc. requirements now and then weren’t that important, but secondary school was different. Here, you had to pay the huge fees before being even allowed in during schools opening. The NGO, RAPADO that once or twice gave me and my brother free uniforms in primary school, had been very helpful, but there had been no such NGOs in high school. I once later in life would appreciate them in a special way, by the way. I had had some good money and felt like giving back a little, so I did.

Now in Form 1 and 2, I had gotten used to being the bottom half of the class, but in form 3 when we started boarding, I gradually started improving and used to not be lower than top 10 from there on. When KCSE came out, I was number 2 in the whole school with A minus of 75 points, and it was a miracle, to me at least. I felt that all of my life’s mysteries had finally led to some sweet fruit. My grandpa, the one who had 6 wives, had only passed the year before and his first wife and our grandma who we had lived with all our lives, would also pass just 2 years later, and both had been very sad. They had taken us up as young orphaned children and despite everything, had brought us up fairly well. I guess what I am trying to say is, other people in our situations had been know to go through worse.

And one might wonder where my sister had been through all of these odeals. Now my brother and I had grown up together, but my sister had probably had the worst experience of us three. We couldn’t know at the end time for, believe it or not, she had disappeared from our lives years before. We would only find out years later that thankfully, it hadn’t been too bad. At least that is what she told us.

It happened when I was not more than 4 years old, and she was not more than 6, that our dear beloved sister ran away from home, never to be seen again. Believe it or not, me and my brother Dadi had our sister just up and disappear, never to be seen again for life. How does one just disappear, you might ask. That had been the question we had grown every second of every day of our lives, grappling with. Surely she had to have been seen somewhere, I mean someone doesn’t just, you know, up and poof, you know, disappear and vanish into the thin air, does one? Surely our uncle’s would have done a better job to try and retrace her last known whereabouts, maybe file a police report and follow up on the same, or do something. Or had they just forever given up on finding her and bringing her back? Well they claim they had tried, several times over the years, allegedly, to look for her but they hadn’t gotten anywhere, apparently. I don’t think so. Either that or they looked but not hard enough. I mean how does a body just up and vanish?

Now days and years had gone by and the gravity of her disappearance faded year on year(to them at least, never to me and my brother Dadi, never), and so with it did their persistence to try to find her and bring her back. We were only kids ourselves, my brother and I, to even have the means to try to take it upon ourselves to get our dear sister back.

But lo and behold, She would years later turn up. Our dear sister was back. Back home. I’m honestly really trying, and miserably failing, to put emotion into this, to really bring out at least in words, the emotion of such an occurrence. Can you believe having a sister for 4 years, then you just…don’t…for over 10 years,…and then again…you do….? It was something that took us several days to alone wrap our heads around. I may have been a little bit confused and not really known what to even say, first time I laid my eyes upon our sister, our only sister, having lived without her for close to 10 years.

Now all these years, despite her having disappeared and probably something bad had happened to her, we always held this hope and belief she was somewhere out there, and that she was safe, and that one day we would be reunited. For we had not lost hope on her. No. we had always hoped and prayed that she will one day come back, that maybe, just maybe, she may just have, all those years, maybe, found a good Samaritan who had taken her up as well and brought her up, well.

And as it turned out, she narrated, that’s exactly what had happened. Now as I said, we had always hoped she would come back, and now she had. We honestly believed and still do, that we probably could have gotten her back way earlier if not immediately she went missing. But then what could 2 4 and 5 year olds really do? We only hoped that our uncle’s were doing all they could to bring her back. That’s the much we could do at the time, really. And pray, yes of course, pray. And when she finally came back, we honestly at first didn’t know how to even react or even process everything. I was in form 3 at the time when she came back. Her coming back had coincided with grandpas funeral. I had been was pulled from school for the funeral and came to meet my long lost sister, for the first time ever you might add, and it had been like a Filipino telenovela story( I didn’t know that at the time of such movie references. We had grown up without TVs, or electricity, all our lives. We still don’t have electricity at home, even now, believe it or not. I hope and pray everyday that I one day get to be the first one to be able to change the situation at home. First time we had TV was when I lived with the Wuon Tony’s.

So her disappearance and coming back (I would later when I started watching TVs, learn) was like a Filipino or Mexican telenovela story, really. I mean think about it, she disappeared when I was 4, she was 6. You can’t really expect a 4 year old to have known the concept of sisters by that age. So meeting her at that moment, after so long, almost felt like we were meeting for the first time. And she was just as, if not more, happy and glad to finally meet us, I could see in her tears of joy. We were finally all back together, and it was the best moment all our lives.

Obviously over the years especially those just before her coming back, we had heard rumors here and there of where she might have last been seen, which town she might be living in, etc. We had first heard that she had last been seen in Kisumu, then we had been told by an uncle or another that she had gone to live with a relative in Nyakach, the she had….and so on and so forth. And we had not really believed these, no, not really. We felt if at all they wanted to find and get her back, they would have. We, especially as we grew, felt such rumors and stories had only been like the old “old yeller went to the farm and is yet to come back” stories that you tell your little kids to not give them the cold hard truth, that their pet is missing. We felt they were just managing us, and our emotions. Really, we’d rather they had tried abit harder, and we felt they would have gotten her back way earlier, especially considering where she would tell us, as having been the place she had ended up having lived all her life.

Look who is appearing to make demands, like they owed us anything. Like they had been some kind of close relatives or guardians in whose hands we had been left by our dead parents. They were doing us a favor even taking us up when our parents both died, in the first place, were they not?. Am I really not giving them the gratitude they deserve? Did they do better than most would given the circumstances? Aren’t there, out there, sadder stories of orphaned children being mistreated and lacking food, clothing, education and other basics, and going through worse? Didn’t we read all about such horror stories in Kiswahili text books in school?

Have I all my life just been an arrogant, ungrateful, horrible brat and rat bastard, detailing our hardships and bringing out how they were evil while really, they were the best anyone in our exact situation, could hope for? Should I have even leaked such awkward and possibly reputation-staining stories of how horrible they were to us, in the first place? If this book ever gets out, how will they even react? Will they disown me forever? What about the stories that make me, myself, look bad, like how I forged signatures and got fired from everywhere, how will my life be even, going forward? Was I the bad guy in our story with Teresia? Was that so, that even the heavens and the high heavens agreed with her and God punished me? Was she vindicated? Is she a witch or was I just the horrible guy and the guilty party and karma and God punished me when all her predictions and curses during fights came true that I will never get a non-single mother to be my girlfriend or end up with, and that I will lose my job and she would get an exact same job? Did God punish me for being a horrible guy my whole life, being a stubborn kid growing up, being ungrateful, blaming my guardians for the horrors of my childhood, and being horrible to Teresia, and stealing from Mr James Kiboi, and wanting to have s*x with his niece? Did He punish me for wanting to have s*x with a lesbian friend, forging signatures at KCB, wanting to scream at Nancy when she was the victim and I the villain after all, and stealing company properties and laptops? Was that why I got the car accident and the car got written off and my life has never been the same even if I lie to myself that I am in a better position in my life right now when the cold hard truth is that I would have been very very far had I not gotten fired from the KCB job, and would now be an established banker earning a stable good salary of not less than 70k per month with a good wife and kid?

When these story get out, will I trend all over social media as the bad guy and the most horrible guy who ever lived, and be looked at differently(badly?) by friends, family and those who know me? What about you, dear reader, what will you think of me? What is and what will your answer be to my original question where I asked if I am the unluckiest person who ever lived?

Will the girlfriends I have slandered and leaked our s****l lives, our fights, our confidential intrigues and secrets, even forgive me? How will I look, in general, in front of the general public and readers, and in the court of public opinion? Will I most likely get fired from even this job, since basically I have detailed how I lied to them that I got a bike accident while really I went to my other job to get paid twice? (Of course they will, if not for that, for how I have said I will steal their laptop too, and how I have said how Saajan is a brat). Will anyone, in their right mind, even ever employ such a horrible person? Won’t they refuse to employ me after reading my true life story and about how some of the qualifications I have bragged about in my Resume and LinkedIn are all big fat lies?

Will I turn out to have all along been the bad guy in life? Was I just a cheeky, mischievous little brat who didn’t like going to the shamba from 3 am to 2pm on hard labour and whips before being told to take the cows out grazing in the fields where I would go around crapping in the bushes and thickets around and that damn cow Ngilu would take that opportunity to lead the rest of the herd into eating and destroying the maize shamba belonging to Basanga or Andago the neighbours who lived near Ka Min Orwaru near the puothe maloka, the shambas of the other side of the Nyamanga hill near Ka Siguda, and who would beat us to near death whenever this happened? Am I just exaggerating my life’s miseries and that we have seen and read about those who have had worse in life? Aren’t orphans all the time getting SA’d and even worse, killed, yet with us none of that even came close (I shouldn’t even think of that) to happening? Aren’t there street children facing worse hardships and I should be lucky I in the first place even had a place to call home at the home of those who had no close relationship with our dead folks, and had no obligation whatsoever to even take us up leave alone bring us up? Aren’t there? Where is it written that the son and the first of six wives of the brother to the mother of your dead father has an obligation to even school you, in the first place? Wasn’t them stealing our late parents wealth just them recovering what they had used to feed us for 18 years?