MUNA

PART 9 : THE OUTREACH

When walking into a room, do not worry worry. Everyone else is afraid. People are scared of people who are scared of people.

******

This place didn't seem like what one would have in mind when they heard someone say they lived on the island. The surroundings felt like they were in the freaking trenches. In fact, the trenches were a little bit better than this place. The category here was SLUM. How on earth could someone or a family be living in a place like this?

The place they called home was a space marked around with bamboo sticks to create an enclosure, and then the ground was ply wood, stacks of which felt so fragile to stand on. In between the ply wood on the ground, you could get a glimpse of a dirty body of flowing water right below the "ground.".

Muna thought someone with a heavy weight should be discouraged from walking on such a surface because the dirty water beneath the wood was a nasty and unhealthy-looking body of water to fall into.
The place reeked.

These people were suffering but did they know? Or have they come to terms with this as an unchangeable reality?

People like these were why Muna wanted to really have money. There were so many people to help. When they were in the part that the settlers referred to as their 'room', Muna fought back tears.

She looked upwards at the ceiling and noticed there was no roof. It was just a thin-looking wrapper that was covering their heads, with large stones at its edges to keep it in place.
Is this life?

"So, these people sleep and wake up here?" She asked a rhetorical question but someone heard her.

"This one is small. If you come to Orile or even Ajah, you will see something similar there but worse."

"Jesus have mercy."

Muna was short of words.

People were interacting with some of the dwellers, who were mostly women and their children.

What Muna didn't quite understand was, why were these people always having so many children? Why bring a child into a world like this when you cannot provide the basic needs of life for them?

She handed a pack of cookies to one of the children that had walked up to her and the child thanked her. Not waiting to show her mother, the child opened it up immediately and started eating it while walking away towards what Muna guessed was her "home.".

Muna wondered if the child had had anything to eat since morning. It was really sad.

They finished up with the settlers there after an hour or so. Muna wasn't sure but she was getting hungry and tired of all the standing. She heard something that sounded like waves hitting rocks and followed the sound.

When she arrived at the point of origin of the sound, she saw a man whipping a young child on the bum with a weird-looking cane. She wasn't having it.
She rushed to the man and held his hand before he landed another stoke on the child's half-torn shorts.

"Sir, please, could you stop beating the poor boy? What has he done that you're beating him like this, Haba?"

She brought the child close to her body and away from the man.

"This boy does not hear a word. E no dey hear."

The man was angry but he tried to contain it as he dropped the weird cane and sat to catch his breath.

He didn't look healthy at all and she wondered where he got the energy to beat a child from.
Some corps members had gathered around as they heard his voice over Muna's. Tj ran to the front and stood by Muna and the little boy, who bent down to pick up his biscuit, which already had dirt in it.