OF COVID, GROUNDED AND FAMILY.

A few days after Christmas in 2019.
I was in front of satellite TV channels tracking a new respiratory disease just emerging out of Wuhan, China.

It had been a typical year for me. Jumping from city to city, with country codes changing on my phone, coupled with check ins on social media with glitzy photos from diverse locations defined the year for me about to end.

As I continued tracking the disease and sharing my concerns with friends and colleagues, we watched with horror as the disease grew from an epidemic into a pandemic.

There were all sorts of stories on social media and the internet, of millions of bodies being incinerated in that Chinese city. Mobile phone numbers went inactive, even from people we knew and worked with.

What I found curious was the fact that very little information was coming from the Chinese government. Aside the news on live international TV of Chinese technological prowess in the full glare of the world where they built two 2000+ beds hospitals for covid patients in days.

Bro in days!

Start to finish.

It felt like watching "back to the future" in my childhood days. The world amazed at the Chinese.

New twists in stories of how the virus emerged started swirling everywhere like a whirlwind chewing up everything in its path.

Then all hell broke loose with the Wuhan lab stories. Then American president Donald Trump torpedoed it further and Trump fans fanned the embers into a raging burning fire. A fire that would consume life as we know it for months without end.

The fires chewed up livelihoods, chewed up lives, chewed up everything. Even chewed up the Trump presidency itself as one of the casualties.

Airline pilots became delivery guys on motorbikes. (Called bodaboda in Swahili and Okada in pidgin Nigeria)
On the paper trail went from the skies to ground zero in used to be cozy, now restless with gang violence in small town Makurdi Nigeria.

As I sit back now and reminisce about the past two years. I wonder how I will start picking up the pieces of what is left two years later, as we start to rebuild our lives back yet again from a seemed zero.

I lost colleagues, then unbelievably; Magufuli died, TB Joshua died and I also lost a loved one to crown it up. It was like an entire era upended suddenly. It's surreal how this reality is setting on stone for me.

Now as we try to reboot our lives with these new set of realities, and being torn between a vaccination and a no vaccination in the midst of new variants and positive test results from even the vaccinated people is really confusing. The need to kick out lack, and put food on our tables (opening up our personal economy) is driving our desire to get back on the paper trail while this madness still persists.

In Africa the elders say "if you don't seek diligently to know what killed your father, it's almost certain the same thing will kill you."

To make matters worse, we still have to deal with very poor people filled to the brim with poverty of the mind.

Lack of material things is better, since we know this kind of lack is temporal, but a lack bordering on insecurities and desires to fight a non existent enemy and something bigger than you is foolhardy.

This is what makes Africa easy to conquer for Neo colonialists.

So in a few weeks we will try to remake our lives into what was before as a new trip under the sun starts in the brand new twenty twenty two AD.

Let's see how that pans out.

The best things that came with these times was waking up everyday for two years straight and being around to watch my son grow from a baby into a toddler and was able to record the sweet moments on cam is something am very thankful for.

I guess family is the most important part in this whole equation.

All the best of the new trip around the sun.

Or let me be more traditional.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Of Covid, Grounded and Family.
Through the wire.
The urban short stories
by Michael Kidemski Uyeh