MEDICO

EPISODE 5. I wasn’t like most 16 year olds you knew. Or they weren’t like me, as I liked to point out. Few of them understood anything about Nigerian Politics- or that of any country for that matter, not to consider the history of economics or anything about Marxism. Most had not even finished reading any of their high school textbooks, and that was even if they could recognize the pages of those books when they were opened. I, on the other hand, had gone over and over again, my Chemistry, Physics and Biology textbooks. I read Literature as well; critiquing Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’, moving on to Wole Soyinka’s ‘Ake’ and onto J.P Clark’s book on poetry. I nailed all my exams, of course. It would be unlike me to score anything less than 80% on any test. Not even after a recent sickle cell crisis. They definitely weren’t like me. But I wasn’t like them, either. I walked cautiously. I ate and drank cautiously...

EPISODE 1 My name is Sepuya Ahmed, and I’m a 16 year old sickler. My mother, Miss Tara, said that when I was born, I was a very beautiful and healthy baby. She had even shown me pictures from the past; especially when she wanted to motivate me to eat better and become robust, in her own words. And though a single mother, Miss Tara did everything in her power to ensure that I had a normal life. She worked as a journalist for the Nation’s foremost newspaper and had been denied promotion thrice on account of her inability to ‘leave the comfort of her home base to the field’.  Her retorting statement always revolved around me. ‘If I leave Sepuya alone, who would take care of him?’ My father was a colleague she met in the university, she’d said. She was very young and still naïve in the 1990s ‘when naivete was still a thing!’ She would state with so much indignation. And then her eyes would shine brightly when she descri...