THE BATTLE WE HAD ON THE SIDELINE

There she was in that hospital room with things covering her face and machine sounds replacing the normal cricket sounds I was used to in the village.The doctors were rushing up and down, nurses were told to step aside,they were racing to save their colleague's daughter;my sister.Ooh dear ALEYA,if only I could process things faster.

In the depths of the rainy lowlands of South Nyanza in Kanyamwa is where I come from.One fine morning on the days approaching Christmas my sister complained of a knife cutting her chest while breathing.My grandmother rebuked the spirits of the old that hammered young girls in those lands from reaching adulthood and added,“Aleya you'll be a great actor." In our laughing the pain hit hard,and the wheezing got us looking for cobra our cat.Damn the spirit's of sickness it was my sisters thoracic cavity making the sound.

Our home is in the bottom barrel of road connectivity and the rains had no mercy to the passways,some cabinet medicine while waiting for my father to come back and provide the next course of action put her to sleep.Weeks later my sister's skin became clammy,her breathing were alternating from rapid to shallow,her nails and lips changed colour.If you were still you could hear her heart drums in different tunes and the coughs got her tears rolling.Our 8 year old sister was turning to a Wizard of Oz and I couldn't do anything about it.

I started to apologize to the jokes we made about her running nose,all the names like nyaum rombo(sheep's nose) that we gave her were my point of guilt.She had to me moved to my mother's room to be managed at night.The cold was her enemy and the dry coughs in hot air were killing her.Short breaths and shaking were random and she became the homesteads priority.

In that machine my sister fought for her life.Rotten thoracic cavity it was said,my strong mother was almost in tears and my father showed no emotions at all.The old man taught me to never cry as a man and he stood on business,just asking his colleagues if she was going to pull through.Prayers and the fairing winds and following seas smiled on my sister and she opened her eyes.A big girl now but ooh Lord we don't even bring that topic back:dark days when breathing that should be our source of life almost made our sister to fade away in the far lands where life is dead.

OOH DEAR PNEUMONIA,ONE DAY YOU'LL DIE TOO!