!Simply-Dunni-on-Spot !SiDoS: Palava-Series-2

by ahjotnaija

Ms. Oladunni Talabi is a beautiful and wonderful addition to the AhjotNaija!BlogFamily. She is a Master student resident in Germany, young and very-full-of-life. She experiments with different forms of writing; this is one of them: Entertaining while strongly pushing for deep self-discovery/identification and cross-cultural dialogues among other interesting themes

See me see wahala! Finally it seems I’m gonna have to ask my heimleiter (housemaster) to make me his secretary o. Abi why do guys keep knocking on my door asking for the direction to their rooms jare- their rooms are not even in my building for crying out loud! Ok. It’s just two guys who has knocked so far, I probably needn’t make a mountain out of a molehill sha.

Ok, listen to my predicament o. So, this guy knocked on my door while I observed my usual idiotic siesta. Did I tell u guys I can sleep through a storm? I can even sleep standing, even with my eyes wide open sef! Being born in Nigeria taught me this.

It’s not an easy feat, I must tell you; especially when you have to sit on the dinning table to read for four hours everyday after school, and your mum sits down like Boko-Haram with koboko watching you! You have to be very smart now to evade her sharp eyes o!

I guess you wanna know what I did back then. I’d just hold my pen tightly in my palm, balance my hand on my book and act like I was writing, rest my face on the table like I was concentrating real-hard. In this position I would be far gone already to say hi to Angel Gabriel in Heaven. Mind you, my Number 6 would be very alert and wired to my mum’s footstep because she checked on us every 20 minutes! Hehehehe *smiles aloud*.

My mum too is one smart woman o chai, I love her die.

My recalcitrant cousins were always sent at least once in their life to live with us. God punish them if their parents made the mistake of calling my mum, chai! chai! chai! Even before they got to our house with their baggages, they started peeing in their pants! The only thing of interest in my house was reading anything in print and ink; and the only SPORTING ACTIVITY we engaged-in was *mum-kid-chasing* us round the compound with her koboko…! Chai! Diaris God o!

So, immediately I heard mum’s footstep, I would open eyes sharply and start writing the first thing that came to mind. God help you if you were not quick enough or if she saw this saliva-mark on the side of your mouth! The neighbours wont be able to rescue you from her grasp that day!

Ok, back to my story jare. I was in this dreamland when suddenly I heard this knock. Like being prompted, the knock got an automatic *come-in* response. I practically screamed the response. By the way, if you don’t know, we Africans are very quick to invite everybody into our home, even goats and cows!

I took a look through my duvet. *Don’t be surprised I use duvet in this hot weather o!* I sized the guy up… Hmm not bad though, I seemed to tell myself. I asked him in ENGLISH which ultimate search brought him to my room.

Then he began… Hallo, Ich möchte…
I went berserk!
Oh jeez, this one can’t even speak English o!
Mo gbe, temi ti bami. Am I not finished today?
Eni leni n je. Today na today.
Then, I calmed my nerves and listened to him speak my self-imposed fourth Language – German. Fortunately, I must have been God-inspired from the dreamland, because on a normal day, even when all my senses were alert, you’d have to say something uncountable times before I could decipher the meaning. When I eventually did, I would code-mix English, Yoruba, Pidgin and German in a response. I’m that bad with language. You know I lived in Ondo town for 14 good years and could not speak the local language saving the f**kya-words. Excuse me please.

But this particular time was a good day. I understood everything he said! So excited! Now, the next problem was quick to show head: How do I give him the description?

Ok now, shebi I know that right is recht and left is link. So I allowed him into my room because its description-in-German we are talking about here o. The heimleiter’s house is actually behind my building, but too bad for me, I don’t know the German word for behind. I did what I had to do sha. I improvised! I inserted *zuruck* and *wieder* which I knew was absolutely wrong, but shebi it’s me, I’m no respecter of rules as long as the receiver understands me. Life can be real good with lesser rules, I swear.

I took him to the window. In my pidginized German, I showed him the heimleiter’s house. Surprisingly, this guy could not see it. And that was after I described for ten minutes with saliva running down my mouth! mucus dripping down my nose! tears gushing outta my eyes! and my head bobbing up and down like agama lizard! Mehn!!! speaking German is not easy o!

Mind you, through my description, I noticed this guy stared at me with a placated smile on his face. He did not even look where I pointed. The holy chant became my dagger! *NO WEAPON FASHIONED AGAINST ME SHALL PROSPER! THOUSANDS SHALL FALL AT MY RIGHT AND TEN THOUSANDS AT MY LEFT BUT NONE SHALL COME NIGH UNTO ME!*

I was worried at this juncture. The reason being this: you know I still don’t understand white people o! If it were a black person, I’d easily give a name to the smile: good! Bad! or sick! But he’s white, so how do I tell jare?

Anyway, I’m a strong black girl and nothing scares me except two things: falling in love and a roller coaster ride. That na story for another day sha. In short, I had to forgo my siesta. I took him to the heimleiter’s house. On the way, he did not relent from staring. Now, I did not care anymore. I was already at my wits end.

I needed to use the toilet when I returned. Guess what I saw in the mirror! Me, of course! And particularly, my NO-LONGER-AT-EASE-HAIR- It stood on tiptoes praising God…! My hair *coup-d’etat-ed* me! It took over my whole face. No be World War III we dey so? i could not even see my eye-brow. My nose was buried! Now, I knew the reason for the (strange???) smile on the white guy’s face. He must’a been wondering all through the vivid explanation what went wrong with the hair! It is not as slick as his!

Oh no! This is why I don’t like to see oyinbo o when I wake up in the morning I would want to tame this wild, untamable raggae-hair. Abi how could he see the house with my hair in his face? He probably was even scared of me sef! Did he even wonder from where I hailed? I don’t blame him.

Oh, did I tell you I have these two crazy oyinbo friends. They would not have glanced at me twice. My white friend would actually have shrugged the hair off my face or his face He does that often. The hair is always in the wrong place at the wrong time. LOL.
They are so used to my black theatrics- the wild hair, the make-up, full lips, white teeth, and particularly my murderous sarcasm and dark sense of humour.

My other white friend even likes me to paint her face with my black make-up…*real cool, I think. How we always clashed over the colour of my skin! She calls me brown. I call myself black. I retaliate by calling her red or yellow. Hehehehe *smies aloud* She so hates it when I call her yellow. She says Asians are yellow! This colour-thing ehn dey tire me at times jare. The good(bad)-thing is but you cannot live in Europe without being aware of your skin-colour.

Aha, you know what? I remember going to watch a football match with my oyinbo-friend. I had to worry for five minutes if the people behind me could see the screen above me. Why? – Its my hair again o, and you know Germans are very nice ehn, they’d never tell you your hair obstructs their view.
I trust Nigerians now with their lack of decorum and courtesy. They’d say something like this… *Ehn ehn ehn, abeg comot your head or hair jare or go sit for back with this your kain-hair!* Nigerians! Ehn! They never cease to amaze me!
But how can Germans say that? Good ones never would even dare; the fact that the hair looks weird and add to that I’m also black- if they tell me to remove my hair or go sit at the back, they’d think I’d mind because everything always have this racial undertone in Germany.

But seriously, if they had done so, I would not have minded though. I am a happy-go-jolly-fellow 🙂

Ok, I must stop my story here.. I have to study.. I’m on this deadline. I really hate deadlines, but who am I to complain when German machines are at the helm of affairs!

I’ve been counting my blessings for some days now. I will certainly get some work done with these oyinbo-guys who keep barging into siesta. I await the third knock tomorrow but first I must look real cool for him o so he does not run outta my room in fright. I’ll have to tie my hair in a scarf before observing my usual siesta! I always look on the bright side of things…

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