Would you please close my eyes?

My name is Sisi Aku and this is my seat. My seat is all about people. People are fascinating to me, they are amazing, they could be refreshingly simple to admire and yet incredibly difficult to deal with. Unfortunately, people, each one of us do die and our stories end. That is the life you and I share at this moment. It has been a journey for me and while I know where I have been, I am not certain where I am heading or how the story will end.

While most births are delivered in the ninth month of pregnancy, I do not understand why it took thirteen months for me. My mother had fallen very sick after the tenth month and had been to the doctor’s several times, but could never go into labor. Having lost seven of her own brothers, her family had become less trusting of modern medicine and decided to consult instead with an herbalist in the port city of Elmina, an old transatlantic slave trade stop on the West Coast of Africa. Seven hens close to laying eggs were what the family was asked to purchase. According to the herbalist, each hen was likely to die at the time of laying eggs. After the seventh hen dies, he had predicted my mum would have the child. Over a period of about two weeks all the hens died except for one which the family thought did not have an egg. On a Sunday morning, my mother went into labor and delivered me at home. That same morning they found the last hen had died and had indeed laid the last egg. That difficult delivery was followed by a period of convulsive attacks that will not end till about a year later. For a person from the Fanti tribe in Ghana, a tribal mark on the cheek is not a sign of tribal identification, but a mark of the person being treated for convulsions. In my case, my mother would not allow anyone to put a cut on my face. So the cut was placed on my scalp and medicinal herbs administered to treat the convulsions.

I asked my mother if she believed I would not have made it had her family not done what the herbalist asked them to do. She answered with a couple of questions; “why did a prophet in the Bible asked the people of Israel to walk seven times around the walls of Jericho before they could destroy it? Why did a man called Jesus spit in dirt and rubbed it in a blind man’s eyes for him to see?” It seems fate will have it so and hence that is how it must be. I personally do not understand why I had to go through this entire ordeal just to be here. Even more perplexing is why am I here and why are you here? For me, the search for answers to that question was chanced upon, on one afternoon in secondary school.

On this fateful afternoon, in the summer of my last year in secondary school, I stood in the middle of the room for about ten minutes, starring at the mirror. As my fingers felt the mark on my scalp, I knew providence was reminding me that I had been lucky. From the childhood convulsions, the battle with German measles, several bouts with bilharzia and episodes of malaria with my violent allergic reactions to quinone, I stood in front of the mirror lucky indeed. Go ahead, touch your face, feel the contours of your face, I thought to myself. Tears have flowed down this face many times this day and will probably overwhelm it days to come. There are indeed going to be ridges and wrinkles years to come that would undoubtedly tell a story, a story that would only belong to me and no one else. But on this day, it is the gaping hole on my forehead that had captured my attention. I am not sure what I had just gone through, but I am content and, maybe, lucky to be alive. I asked the doctor why I could only see through my right eye, but total pitch black darkness in the left eye. Before he answered, I prayed to God just to find the time later on to cry more, because I needed to.

He asked me to take a few steps forward as the nurses let go of my hand. I took two steps and fell hopelessly to the ground. As they helped me up, the doctor asked me how I felt. All I wanted to do was to finish my homework and finish a book I had been reading before the accident. It took me the next three months to fully recover from the head injury that almost killed me, as the doctors later told my mother. Luckily, the infection that followed did not result in blindness as the doctors had feared.

What I had just gone through was only a reminder of just how much my life had depended on providence and the goodwill of other people around me.

I had never met my childhood angel before and as I look back now, I cannot even recall his face, but I remember the man smiled a lot. His voice comes through loud and clear even today, having left a memory that my life depends on to this day. What I know is that he was my friend Kenneth's father. As I lay in the dormitory room dying with no one able to understand my pain or explain why my head had swollen overnight, he had the courage or, should I say the heart, to come in, demanding to see me. The footsteps vibrated like a series of steel thumps through my head. As deafening as the sounds were, I knew my help was here.