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It was one of those days when life unexpectedly slaps you in the face.

Two mothers with
four young schoolgirls walked into a museum in an east coast USA town
on Martin Luther King Day in 2003 and I immediately recognised the
guide in his uniform jacket. He was paunchier, and balder and his face
had aged considerably. When I first knew him he was a reporter at a
news organisation full of vim, hard working and articulate, rearing to
go.

We met on
assignment in the late seventies covering the Ecowas conference holding
that year in the Ghanaian capital, Accra. I was then working at the
Daily Times, the only female reporter in a group of 15 or so
journalists on a trip that took us to Cape Verde, Ghana and Senegal and
was bookmarked in my mind by the overthrow of General Fred Akuffo that
followed soon after our departure and led to the rescheduling of our
return route to Lagos. Bros Sege was running things then.

This was my first
foreign reporting assignment, when I came to understand the “man body
no be wood” category of travelling expenses that all male reporters and
the male editors to whom they had to account, were so familiar with.

I have to say the majority of my male colleagues, this gentleman especially, were respectful and as helpful as they could be.

By the time I left
Nigeria in 1989, this man had risen to the top position at the
organisation he worked for and moved on. I think he had even done some
stints as press secretary to some governor or other.

But evidently, from
meeting him again that day at the museum he had come down on different
times living in the States. He told me he was working two jobs,
guide/guard at the museum and cashier at a big retail chain in a
neighbouring town. He had got the current job courtesy of a former
colleague, his superior at the news organisation in Nigeria, a former
university professor who also worked at the museum. They had kept in
touch through good times and bad and had maintained a network, helping
each other out.

It was one of those
encounters where everything is left unsaid and the only question just
stands there like a giant elephant in the room everyone is trying to
ignore.

Yes he was keeping body and soul together and his grown children were probably working their way through college or high school,

helping their
parents with the bills, as mother held down a similar job to Dad’s. It
would be a life lived from paycheck to paycheck, no extras. Money for
air tickets home would have to come from carefully hoarded overtime
pay, as would any other treats, and remittances to help family back in
Naija.

One wonders
sometimes whether people at home understand how hard life can be in
those greener pastures across the seas. Yes there are rewards but they
do not come easily. In the absence of kinsmen and women close to the
seats of power, or extended family members who have made it
financially, in the lands of opportunity abroad one has to make one’s
luck with hard work and the requisite qualifications. What you thank
your stars for is having reached a place where you have the opportunity
to go as far as you want.

That aside, there
is no one to call on when that message from home asking you to pay your
levy for Uncle D’s funeral comes. If you take the time off to make the
trip, you lose the pay. Finding the extra to make up your donation has
to be calculated in overtime, or the extra job on the side that you
hustled to find.

This then is the
source of the anger that sometimes follows the discovery that all the
hard work that could have offset your study loan went on some bundles
of aso ebi.

Today things
promise to get even tougher as poverty becomes the great leveler and
financial strength replaces those other arbiters of rank and status
such as age, learning, experience, even love. If a younger brother or
sister has more means they become the elders everyone turns to. Uncles
and aunts whose voices used to be strident sometimes don’t ring out so
loud when the family is gathered and decisions are to be made,
especially those that involve putting down money. The favorite son or
daughter, niece or nephew is not always the one who loves most but the
one who gives most compared to others and not in proportion to how much
they have either.

But the deep end of this is even worse. Some day, when hopefully we
will have climbed out of the quagmire into which we are sinking,
someone will offer up for symposium discussion their proposed
dissertation subject on the slippery slope that links the descent from
419 to technology-free kidnapping.