STORYTIME TAPESTRY

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Special Treat ??“ ? ? Georgewaters Ojeigbe

Jan 26, 2006

THE LAST DAY OF MY NEIGBHOR??™S DOG (December 2005)

By: Georgewaters Ojeigbe

??“ Lagos, Nigeria

gojiegbe@jhplc.com

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Should I say this is the concluding part of the once told story of Jack my neighbor??™s dog, or just a sad ending of Jack, the dog that once terrorized me and later became acquainted with me!

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On Saturday morning, 10^th December, 2005 as I sat down under a big mango tree which stands across the road in front of my flat, I saw Jack the dog come to a nearby shrub, lifted up one of his legs and wee on it.

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Jack! Jack! I called out but he only just eyed me and went back to the direction which he came from.?  He had started walking like a hunchback homo-sapiens and he had already developed bowl legs due to his overweight.?  Sometimes ago, you could remember that I made a plea that some concerned people should advice Jack??™s owners to get him trimmed down to keep him from ???dieing of obesity or obecountry???.?  But I was wrong, Jack was not destined to die of it, instead it was an inferno that took his life on the 11^th of December, 2005.? 

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Saturday went by like any other day with nothing too spectacular.?  I saw a tenant of one of the flats that burnt, in fact the fire started from his flat.?  We consciously exchanged pleasantries whereas unconsciously danger had plotted it deadly mission; just part of the journey of life.?  Nobody knows the next moments, even though soothsayers could say what is coming, but not in steps.?  Only Jehovah Lord God can see the future exactly!

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As usual, at about 7:35 p.m. the electricity referred to as NEPA now known as ???POWER HOLDEN went off.?  This is a time when lanterns, candles or electricity generators are put on.?  Those that uses electric cooker (hotplate) normally switchover to either stove-cooker or firewood.?  One of these was the cause of the inferno, the hotplate did!?  You may wonder why the electric cooker.? 

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The kind of electric cooker they had only has one burner and it does not have a regulator.?  You can only switch on and off the power from the socket on the wall.?  This means that the degree of heat do not have limit.?  It will go on and on until the whole liquid in the cooking utensil dries up.?  Maybe we sometimes underestimate the strength of electricity or fire!

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The man whose flat the fire started from has a kind of a nosy woman for a wife.?  In Nigeria, such people are called AMEBO, TATAFO, ELEKE; a gossip.?  Each time her husband travels back to his station in another state in the eastern part of Nigeria, she goes around the estate puke nosing into peoples affairs.?  Several times, she had been exposed and had been fought with.? 

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According to one of her neighbors, this woman had once lit a candle and forgot it on the sitting room??™s carpet where it almost gutted the house in the first place while she locked the main door and went out to carry out her usual adventure of gossips.?  The neighbor smelt the fume and this nosy woman was looked for, but to no avail before the door was forced opened to put of the fire.?  ? 

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The second time was when she forgot an electric ring boiler in a plastic plate.?  Same practice, she went on her usual professionalized gossip.?  Again, someone discovered it.

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The third time, the disaster could not be averted as it happened deep into the night while most people were already on bed (most Nigerians sleep on bed and not in bed due to intense heat).?  Since the electricity was restored at about 11:30 a.m., someone like me was watching the late night movie on TV.?  I had rented some films that I wanted to watch after TV stations might have finished the better part of their transmissions.? 

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I have a friend staying in one of the rooms in my flat.?  He was in his bedroom watching TV when he started to hear the cries, fire! fire!?  Before now, I had noticed the stabilizer attached to the electronic gadgets in the sitting room trying to regulate.?  I assumed it was the zonal transformer that was been witch hunted (a superstitious belief that witches around inflate transforms).?  Few minutes later, I had footsteps across the road.?  Thinking that armed robbers were outside, I dodged behind the curtain before shutting the louver at the bottom of the windows and returned to watch TV.?  In few minutes later sounds of multitude was being heard, now my opinion again changed believing it was a prayer group, a church called Mountain of Fire and Miracles, although, I call them ???FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN.?  They always have ???vigils??™, known as ???NIGHT VIGIL??™ in Nigeria.?  Their prayer slogan is ???DIE! DIE! DIE!????  The church loud speakers face my apartment??™s windows.?  Have you ever felt disturbed at nights??  That is exactly what they do to the community every day as they keep this tradition of fighting the devil shouting pray, pray, pray; die, die, die; boser, boser, boser; ke, ke, ke; yah, yah, yah; doh, doh, doh and all kinds of devil chasing words at late night hours.?  He rushed out of the bedroom to inform me of his thoughts.?  He looked and sounded worried as he was trying to let me understand the fire on a building.?  Because the film I was watching was getting more interesting as the star actor was getting closer his target, I never wanted to be disturbed.?  As he kept repeating those words of ?????¦like fire burning somewhere??¦????  I simply told him that the shout of fire is coming from Fire on the Mountain Church.?  I thought he should had known this by now as sometimes in the nights he also could hardly sleep due to intense noise especial when they seem to be casting out demons from someone and the ???I bind you, I loose you??? is going on and someone is screaming like a wild animal.?  I saw from his looks that he was so convinced the fire was not coming from the church.?  Just to convince him, I opened the main door.?  It was then it got clearer that something was actually wrong.?  I peeped through the burglary proof and saw the environment dark as a glass painted with red.

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He presumed that one of the neighbors??™ sons had inflated their flat as it is his custom to always engage his father in a big fight whenever he got drunk in local gin called OGOGORO.

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The electric cables on the poles as at this time had started glowing making everywhere to look like London bridge is falling down, run, run, run!?  I quickly put off the switchbox, changed my cloths to slimmer ones before dashing towards the building gutted by fire.

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As I saw thousands of sympathizers already assembled at the premises, I quickly made a decision to get others informed to switch-off their electricity supply from the meters.?  Not too long the zone??™s transformer was switched-off making the burning building be the only illuminant.

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Lot of GSM (cell phone) calls were made to emergency operators to inform the fire services on our behalves.?  Traditionally, rescue agents here are too slow, or are more or less not existing.?  They could hardly reach the destination due to intense traffic jams in the city of Lagos.

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Many of the fire services ignored our calls in disguise of ???no water in the tank??™.?  A particular one complained of bad vehicle and another said no fuel in the vehicle.?  Very soon, water buckets flowed out from different angles.?  In a twinkle of an-eye in the early Sunday morning, at about 1 a.m., a plot of 6x6x12=432 flats had assembled around the burning building.?  The only source of water was from the wells on the estate.

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We learnt that the nosy woman forgot to put off the hotplate from the mains.?  The current had flowed for about an hour and the hotplate was right under the meter.?  The heat from it inflated the switchbox and the current fed back that exploded in the kitchen.?  By this time the whole family of five - father, nosy wife and three kids ranging from one and a quarter to seven years were fast asleep in the bedroom.? 

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As usual with third world nations, which Nigeria is not excluded houses are badly constructed with no sense of safety measures such as fire-exit, fire extinguishers and probably fire jackets as it is done in developed nations.?  The flats on the estate are built in this form; the toilet, bathroom and the kitchen are situated in the middle of the apartment, the bedrooms at one end and the sitting room at the other end.?  Each of these flats has metal protectors such that in the event of fire one could be trapped which was almost the case of this family if it had not been a smart neighbor living in the back flat and this happens to be Jack owners??™ flat.

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This smart neighbor, who was the only occupant in Jack??™s flat that night was in the process of getting an item in the bedroom when he discovered through the kitchen to kitchen window the flame in the other apartment.?  That was when he quickly ran out to alert the occupants.

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The man of the house had his first daughter in his bedroom while the other two were with their mother in the next room.?  He rose up from sleep to attend to the late night visitor.?  Immediately he got out of his bedroom, he knew that something was wrong.?  He needed no third party to interpret the meaning of red flame in a house!? 

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According to the man, he quickly opened the door immediately knowing the happening.?  Instead of his wife to evacuate her children, she picked a long robe that looked like a Prince Charles and Lady Diana??™s wedding day outfit, tied it on her waist, started running up and down, down and up the 3-floor building.

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The husband thinking the children were in safe place began to throw down some belongings.?  He threw a generator that shattered on the ground, and many other items before lot of people got to know about the fire.?  Funny enough, the few properties salvaged were stolen before dawn.

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It was his little house maid of about 12 years old who realized the danger faced by them that ? quickly picked the sleeping son of about 7 years and the last baby girl of about one and a quarter years old.?  With all of her strength she carried the baby on one hand, pulled and dragged the 7 years old boy with the other hand; what a brave child to have had at home at that particular dangerous hour.?  She deserved an award of brevity.?  If not for her braveness, it would had been the 3 children burnt in the inferno.?  The only one left in the bedroom was the one who slept on the father??™s bed.?  The nosy mother hardly reasons rightly with her common senses, father was too confused and neighbors were helping to put off the flame at the early stage so there was total breakdown of mental faculty.

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As at the time the fire became unbearable it was too late to realize the crying child trapped in the bedroom.?  Witnesses said they heard her crying ???mummy, mummy, the fire is here!????  Others said that she was only screaming.?  Whether or not, all that is now history as the fire service men that arrived faster than usual at about 2:30 a.m., an hour after been informed due to no traffic on the roads at the early hours of that Sunday morning found the burnt corpse close to the kitchen. The fire service men worked hard to put off the fire but their water finished quickly since the tank was half filled!

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For Jack, I learnt that when rescue came to his flat, he simply ignored the rescuer.?  Instead, he kept on barking and running into the rooms.?  I guess the door was shut behind him after the whole humans except for one who tried to find other things to rescue but could not and he later escaped through the balcony on a ladder.? 

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Well, the topmost flats of four were raised down to nothing and not a pin was recovered!?  It was said that about three out of those flats had gas cylinders in their kitchens, which worsened the situation.

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At about 4:50 a.m. the rain fell which is unusual because we are in the dry season geographically known as Harmartan.?  It helped to subdue the fire that was still burning after the fire service crew complained of none-availability of water.

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Finally, I went to bed at about 6:05 a.m. and woke up at about 9:45 a.m. only to find the displaced people looking like refugees even in their own country.?  More and more people trouped to see the damages.?  I later went to the various burnt flats upstairs and as I entered the flat which Jack belong to, it looked like a ghost land.?  I walked through the little corridor where I saw the remains of Jack??™s body squatted in the bathtub.?  I suspected he was looking for a colder place as the heat from the fire got more intense.

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For two days, I kept going back to the burnt flats where used to look promising but now looks like a ghost land.?  All the memories and dreams of the past have all gone with the flame.?  I could not imagine the trauma the little girl and Jack might have gone through before giving up the ghost.

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As I stood there wondering the bitterness of things in life, I suddenly remembered the World Trade Center (WTC) referred to as the nine-eleven (9/11)!?  I thought of the horrors faced by the trapped humans in the WTC, the agonies and horrors of the sympathizers, the faiths of their families hoping to see their loved ones saved, the fears of the government for the unknown and so many other unimaginable things.?  With emotions mixed together in a cloud of doubts and pains, I realized that this is just one of the many tragedies that occur in the world.?  ? This is just one of many sorrows faced by human beings, and I realized that there would come a day when we shall see not our shadows again but we shall be in the bosom of the Lord who is the creator of the entire universe.?  With faith, I prayed that my end in this world should not be in such agonizing pains even though no one who has been faced with such cruelty never prayed for such misery of life on this planet called the green world, habited by most fantastic creations of Jehovah Lord God.?  God sees and knows why everything of such has to happen and only him can protect his own at a particular time.?  I have seen the wicked, the good and the mild die mysteriously, I have seen the wicked lived longer, I have seen the rich fallen, I have seen many respected preachers die an agonized death, yet I still do not understand the way of this world.?  Left alone I rather go to sleep and be peacefully transmuted into glory away from this dark ages, loomed with miseries of many untold events; the under ocean stinks, wicked spirits hanging in the airs and clouding the ends of all present systems but for how long and when??  That question is left for him who is the creator, the master of all knowledge to decide.

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THE END!

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Georgewaters Ojeigbe

gojiegbe @jhplc.com

BIO-DATA

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I was born on 21^st April, 1970.?  I live in Lagos, Nigeria the most populous city in Africa. I sing in a Church music group where I fellowship.?  I love sports.?  I love admiring the heavens and other wonderful works borne from Jehovah??™s hands.?  I discovered the power of writing stories, encouraged by Carol.?  Thanks for her existence!?  I am pet lover minus snakes; I so much hate this creature called snake but others I prefer.?  I like to do lots of home works like creating my art works, gardening, making some home furniture, fitting electrical appliances etc.

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