By Solomon
Mensah
 |
| Farah (left) & a casualty of the war |
Somewhere
in August this year, I had gone to shave my hair at a barbering shop located at
Coastal-Spintex, Accra. After shaving, I chanced upon The Times, a UK newspaper, on the centre table of the shop which made me spend hours
reading. While reading, I bumped into a write-up on the Israel-Gaza conflict
making me to abandon the rest of the stories.
“Every
night, as Gaza City shudders under a barrage of bombings, the secondary school student
cowers in her bedroom and posts a blow-by-blow account in English of what it is
like to live under fire,” Bel Trew, a freelance journalist, wrote (in August 4,
edition) of a 16 year old Farah Baker.
“She likes
Taylor Swift, wants to be a lawyer and is an avid user of social media,” Bel
noted. “The only difference between Farah Baker and other 16-year-olds around the world is that she tweets from a
war zone. Her twitter feed, @Farah Gazan, is littered with videos of
airstrikes, recordings of drones and photos of latest casualties.”
Farah does not merely worry about tweeting from a war zone but the constant
‘hide and seek’ with death. She lives opposite to the Al_Shifa Hospital. Farah would at
times stand on her rooftop and observe what is happening
at the morgue of the hospital whenever situations are a bit
calmer. On one of her observations, she tweeted seeing “a woman shouting,
screaming and slugging. After a while, a doctor arrived and with him was a dead
body which was covered by a white cloth.”
She has
witnessed three wars which she described as 'hardest ones'. For her and her
family, to survive in Gaza for just an hour is the greatest miracle one could ever recount; the kind
a Ghanaian would seize the microphone in church to shout on top of their voice Mark Anim
Yirenkyi’s ‘Aseda dwom.’
That is
it: Gaza scare! But in all these brouhahas, in struggling to sustain one’s breath, Farah and her
family have not ceased to praise Allah for protecting them. They have not
killed themselves by committing suicide to shame the enemy. They have not
stopped smiling because though some of their hospitals (if not all) are bombed,
food and drugs are in little supply, most houses razed down to rubbles and what
have you. So... who are you to end your life because the going has become
tougher for you?
Perhaps,
you might think you are the only troubled soul wandering on Odomankoma’s
planet. Listen to this....
It was
only two weeks to complete teacher training college. The colleges of education across
the country had given their third year students some days off to relax from
their teaching practice before going back to campus to write their final
papers. I had had my teaching practice at Wamfie, Dormaa East
district, and, then, I would rush home (Sunyani) to eat from my mother’s kitchen from time
to time.
We
vacated, came home and met my lovely mother, Ama Adease, and the entire family.
As old as she was, she would never entirely ‘handover’ the kitchen to her three
daughters to do the cooking while she sat idle. She would strive to do
something to assist the cooks. Perhaps, the only time she vacated the kitchen
was when she went to the farm and came back home late.
Ama Adease would
share her meal with those afflicted by hunger and her foodstuffs with the
needy. These and many other benevolent deeds became part and parcel of her
life. Once again at home, I enjoyed seeing her hold on to such deeds tightly
like the scarf sitting on the head of a Nigerian woman.
But... on
19th July, 2010, the dawn of the day we were supposed to leave the house for
school, the unexpected happened. It was around 4:00am when one of my brothers
struck a loud bang at my door. I had slept around 1:00am (doing some reading)
so to be called to wake up at 4:00am was sickening. I managed to creak the door
opened only to be told “Maame awu!” to wit; mom is dead.
All of a
sudden, it seemed I was watching a Kumawood movie. I shook terribly as if I had touched a jelly fish. “This can’t be
true,” I told myself. The very night that hatched that awful dawn, I had had a
chat with my mother telling her that when the cock crowed to usher in a new
day, I would leave the house for school. She responded ‘Ok.’ She sat in a
plastic chair in the heart of the compound chatting with the wife of my brother
who broke the news to me.
When the
hour hand hit 2:00pm that Monday and a number of black-clad sympathizers sat
under the mounted canopies, it was then I realized “agye gon.” Maame (as we
affectionately called her) was gone. Almost a year to commemorate her one year
anniversary, on 18th June, 2011, my father also passed on. A smell of death I could sense.
Since these days till now, knowing how painful it is to lose a relative, I
never have wished for anyone (not even my arch enemy) to taste or smell death.
Life has
not been easy. I struggled to finance my education at the Ghana Institute of
Journalism because I closed the door of my source of income – teaching - to
pursue my heart desire; journalism. I did no longer want to live someone else’s
dream and I have dearly paid a price for switching professions. There have been days I lived on less than Ghc2.
There have been days all hopes were lost. I was recently turned down
(employment) by two great Ghanaian media platforms. But amazingly, there have also been days people asked me
for an unimaginably huge sums of money in the form of loan, asked me to help
them publish their books and the list is endless. Isn’t God a wonder working
God?
Following
the reignition of the Israel-Gaza conflict on the 8th of July, 2014, the pungent smell
of death in Gaza became much more suffocating. It was, therefore, not
surprising that on 28th July, 2014, Farah Baker shared a tweet: “Gaza is my area. I can’t stop crying. I might die
tonight.”
The most
important thing to be well noted here is that Farah did not
use the word ‘will’ but ‘might.’ Get the difference. Fortunately, her little
faith of a sustainable life one day at a time worked magic. “This girl can’t
believe that she is back for her ordinary peaceful life. I am soooo happy,”
she tweeted recently. Israel and Palestinian groups have on 26th August, 2014, agreed an
open-ended ceasefire to end seven weeks of fighting in Gaza.
I have
never lost hope in life, Farah did not, and I charge you to steadfastly hold on to God, faith and hope,
too. Forget not that no matter how bad you think your predicament is, someone
else’s is more bitter than yours. I write from Gaza to motivate you. O.J, the Ghanaian
musician, transliterated his song “Obi Nya W’ay3”;
“Somebody get you do.”
The writer
is a Sunyani-based Freelance journalist.
Twitter: @Aniwaba
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