FACELESS

Chapter 1

      Fofo chose to spend the night on the old cardboard laid out in front of the provision store at the Agbobloshie market place because it was a Sunday. It had nothing to do with Sunday being a churchgoing day. The reason was simply that if she hadn't, she would have stood the risk of losing her newly acquired job of washing carrots at the vegetables wholesale market. Fofo would have spent the Sunday night into Monday dawn with her friends across the road at the squatters' enclave of Sodom and Gomorrah watching adult movies her fourteen years required her to stay away from, and drinking directly from bottles of some slightly milder locally produced gin. Ultimately, she would have found herself waking up Monday morning beside one of her age group friends, both of them naked, hazy and disconcerted and oblivious to what time during the night they had stripped off their clothes and what they had done with their nakedness. Sucked into the life of the streets and reaching out to each new day with an ever-increasing hopelessness, such were the ways they employed to escape their pain.
          A boy and a girl of about Fofo's age who were making a home on the streets like her, were once asked by a reporter from one of the private FM stations during a survey about their most passionate dreams; dreams as in Martin Luther King's famous words:“I have a dream.”The reporter thought the kids would be craving for material things like shoes and dresses or, more practically, blankets for warmth at night. She was swerved. They craved for warmth all right, but of a kind that many with secure roofs over their heads and the assured love of a parent, at least took for granted.
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