By David G Maillu
Published February 3, 2024
For Abdu it was the most exhausting, humiliating, and challenging waiting. That was expressed by his visible restlessness. If he had been a smoker, he would have smoked a whole packet of cigarettes for the one and a half hours of waiting for the final results of Halima’s medical
report. Halima was his young wife of twenty-five years. He was six years older than Halima. What worried him most was his sixth sense predicting that the report would be terrible.
Finally, Halima erupted out of the door with the horror of the results written on her face boldly. She had breast cancer, the last thing they would want to hear on earth. The two broke into tears even before they left the hall, leaving people puzzled. They walked hand-in-hand as is to
say, “We shall die together.”
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They were five years married and they had a gorgeous son today aged
three and a half years. They had been thinking of going for their second
child when Halima’s pains gave them the alarm. Today they were
church-mouse poor, not to mention the threat to their marriage if Abdul
was drafted by the terrorist gang in the name Alshabaab fighting to take
over the control of Somalia and turn it into a sole Islamic state. He
had gone underground to avoid the drafting and when he realized it was
just a matter of time before the terrorist militia caught up with him,
perhaps after torturing his wife with a gang rape, he stole a neighbor’s
camel with which he exiled himself and his family to Kenya. The journey
by night most of the time was treacherous. After twenty-three days, by
Allah’s g race, he crossed the Somalia border through one panya route and
broke into the Republic of Kenya territory. He had made some important
contact with one Mahmud, a distant relative living in Kenya.
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“Halima, we’ve made it! I can’t believe it!” Abdul cried tears of joy and his wife joined him for the chorus. The son didn’t cry because he didn’t know what the crying was all about if it wasn’t an amusement. An agent of Mahmud received the family in a hired four-wheel drive car and transported it to Mombasa through Malindi, a journey that took four days. That was after Abdul had sold the stolen camel for a throwaway
price. The money from the camel was the only money he had in the whole world. He had left Somalia without a cent.
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