Tuesday, December 18, 2007

april fool: part 2

4/1/2003:
i remember telling people that the most physically painful day of my life was the day i was medically evacuated. just last month. that has changed. that day is now the day i began, just began, to describe below. 4 hours later, i left for Bamenda. in terrible pain. every bump on that Wum-Bamenda road, i felt. i cursed. i cried. i prayed and prayed to pass out. to go into shock and pass out. pain. terrible pain. so much pain that i couldn’t even fear the consequences. that was too far off. down the road. a bad, bumpy bush-road, at that. i was focused on pain.

only 12 hours after i picked myself up off the ground and dusted myself off. only 12 hours after realizing that i’d broken something did i get some morphine. nothing else worked. only that killed the pain enough (enough... not all the way) to allow me to sleep.

it is now 10 days later. my left arm (my hand and elbow, to be exact) still hurts. i’m still popping pain killers. although not as strong or as comforting as morphine. i still have trouble falling asleep. and i have this cast, a full-arm cast (from just under my arm-pit to just below my fingers), that weighs a ton. like sleeping with a bag of bricks on top of you. my shoulder hurts. my fingers are still numb. everything takes twice as long with one hand and a cast. my neighbors are nice. they help me out. wash my clothes. clean my dishes. mop my floor. send me fufu. everyday. fufu. everyday. there is fufu in the kitchen now, as i write this.

but wait, it gets better. today, i gave 2 statements. 2 statements of what happened that particular day. one to the folks at Public Security. one to the folks @ Special Branch. why all the interest? i didn’t ask for an investigation. i didn’t report anything or anybody. i was just going to let this pass. it was all behind me. but now. now i’m in the middle of a mess. money was being chopped. people intimidated. bosses called. inquiries made. egos bruised. a mess. with me, my friend Muhammadu and this teenage dare-devil Kadze in the middle of it. but this is now way over our heads. bigger than us. yet we’re still in the middle of it.

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