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Yesterday I walked into the lairs of quixotic air checking in on a terminally ill friend at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Benin City. With the agony of uncertainty, hanging and pervading the air , a visit to a confirmed corona management centre, collapsed and complicated my sturdy nerves and making my hair on end. I wasn’t scared though, but was sufficiently petrified of ensnaring claws of tiny monsters floating blissfully and suzeraintly.
At the accident and emergency unit, right at the entrance of the hospital, death and hope have never seemed at peace and war. Healthcare workers in restrained haste, patients howling in unrestrained anguish and relations of the sick, in glances and sighs that express and suppress hope, disaster, fear and ennui. A scene of shifting emotions and cascading cultural watershed.
As Africans we never die alone. When we choose to exist, it is usually in the presence of kindred and floating ancestral spirits, forming a guide, guard and smooth transition from the physical to the spiritual. We never die alone but sleep in the deep profundity of fecund graves, unlike animals- usually the domesticated ones, that end up in a hole. It is all deception and double speak. A grave is a hole, but it’s so called a grave, because we can’t bear to describe the final terminus of our love ones, as a hole, full of waiting insects, rodents and suffocating gas. We managed death so blissfully, so alluringly that, illnesses, deaths and burials have ritualistic, cultural and religious processes all executed with warmth, affections and sighs. All that is about to change.
Yesterday, at the U.B.T.H, in the face of agonizing distrust, I saw health workers, express emotions ranging from horror and pity as tragedies mixed with triumphs. It was obvious that they are fighting an asymmetrical war in a constantly shifting battleground. They are fighting a virus that is merciless against interlocutors and interpleaders .They are fighting against microbes who aren’t hiding or lurking, but are on the attack, against human prey. They are frenetically battling against tiny mosters ,who have no respect for medical doctors and nurses. They are fighting against inexustably dangerous virus, protesting intrusion of their environments by scientists in search of laurels. A sordid case of trouble go sleep yanga go wake am. These viruses have always existed in their world until we invaded their habitats. Like bees in a calm beehive, they never bothered men. We invaded their environment, intruded their sphere and became infected, providing these mutating idiots new opportunities for epidemic fame and media attention.
Yesterday at U.B.T.H, I saw frightened doctors. I saw worried nurses. I saw defanged soldiers poised in battle with dangerous and extremely hazardous infectious enemies with the poorest of containment ammunition. Doctors and Nurses are paying a heavy price for the sins of their silly sick laboratory quarantined colleagues. Patients are dying not from Corona, but from their shocking fall from grace. They have become moving time bombs, pathogenic persons, stripped of humanity and all worldly acclaims. They are dying alone and massively dumped into holes, like domesticated animals, without farewell, thanks to the invaders of Wuhan.
Jefferson Uwoghiren Esq
Benin City.
5th May, 2020