I WILL TRY Part 1 Eps 3 At times he asked me to sit down in front of him. With a small pot of beer immediately in front of him, and a straw made of some kind of a grass in one hand, he taught me to write the figure Six. This evidently was the only figure he knew, for he kept on teaching it to me. Some times he invited me to have a little drink. Not even a little bit? O sure, you will drink it , he would say if I refused his offer. What will you do when I am dead? he would ask. you know, I will alwawys be asking you for beer, and if you dont give me any, I shall kill all your children, he would say with a wide smile reavealing his beautiful V teeth, and with one hand playing with his beard. He said this was because people thought that if they did not place some pots of beer on the graves of their dead relatives , a calamity would before them. There were many other boys in the village. Like most of them I wore no clothes except a piece of string tied around my waist with a piece of hanging from it. I often lost the cloth and ran around the village with nothing on. I was never ashamed. My father made beautiful baskets. Some times he sold them and got sufficient money to buy himself and mother a piece of cloth. Normally he bought black, durable cotton fabrics and my parents wore them for three or four years before they fell to pieces. Then my father began worrying but, one way or another, he always managed to get a cloth for my mother. Those who had cows were lucky because they could sell some of them and buy clothes. We had no cows . We never complained about our poverty. There was nobody to whom we could complain. I was always proud that we had enough to eat, that all the food we ate was ours, produced by our own labour in our own garden. We never begged for any food. If only my father had been taught some worthwhile trade, I am sure that we would never have been so poor. He could make baskets, but very few people wanted to buy them because they could make them themselves.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:22:30 +0000
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