Drowning In Porridge

I was born in my grandparents house and I spend about 10 years of my life there with my parents until we got our own house. Those days, everyone knew me to be stubborn because I was always either hopping around , running or even crawling. My legs couldn’t just be at once place for long.

Obviously, my grandparents house was a family house. We stayed there with my grandparents, some of my aunties and uncles and my cousins and even nephews and nieces. We always someways somehow managed to have visitors around. There was always so much going on at home with how big the house was and the number of people around.

As far as I can remember,Ramadan season was the deal during those days in our house. What is food? What is drinks? You would eat till you can eat no more. As kids, we didn’t use to fast then so you can imagine how we enjoyed. All the leftovers and goodies went into our tummies and we were always the first to taste the meals for the day.😅

I know you’re wondering how all this fun is related to death. Relaxxxxx, we will get there. I bet we all know what basins look like right? Okay! Now picture a big metallic basin , the ones that were used in the olden days to bath kids. Yes! But now, its purpose is for food.

During Ramadan, my family has special sets of cooking utensils stored away for this season. We had so many big basins specifically for preparing different kinds of drinks and porridge. We would drink and give all our neighbours every day. That was the routine. All this went on in our backyard. You’d visit us and not even know what’s going on until you visit our kitchen and backyard. All the women would come together to work everyday just for us to eat well.

So, after these drinks and porridges are prepared, they are then transferred into these basins and kept aside to cool down before they are consumed. As a child, those were the best moments because my mom was too busy to worry about what I was doing with the other kids. We would always play hide and seek during this period and no matter how my grandpa screamed at us we wouldn’t budge.

On one of our usual running marathons around the compound, stubborn me extended my running to the backyard which was off limits for us. You should see how my aunties screamed at me and I quickly run back to the main compound.

Only God knows what spirit was following me that day but I still made my way to the backyard over and over again. All of a sudden, I heard screams around me and I lost touch of reality. I woke up later only to be told that I feel in a basin of porridge.😅

God being so good, I didn’t have any burns on my body and I didn’t even feel any pains because I wasn’t on earth then. My family members spoke about it for while and all of a sudden no one ever spoke of it up until today. I can just imagine how scared my mom and aunties were because from that moment onwards, no kid was allowed to the backyard during such times again.

Who knows, I could have lost my life from falling in hot porridge but I serve a living God.😅

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all images belong to me.

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