“Favour! Go and feed the goats.” Mother said, how I was feeling didn’t matter.

“Mother! Can you allow me to just finish my dream, please?” I was talking to her while covering myself with the torn, louse-infested blanket on the muddy floor without tiles or cement, which was close to the kitchen where my mother was trying to light the fire. She was a loudspeaker to my ears every morning.

“Come on; you do not have much time; it is getting late; hurry up!” She countered me.

She took the Chitenje or the wrapper which I was using as a compliment to the torn blanket. After the cold hit me, I had no choice but to get up anyway.

“Oh! No! Not today.” Sadly and tearfully, I showed my mum the small patches of wounds from the lice on my back. It was itching as well.

“Your hair is blanketed with the lice. Let me shave it. Dry your blanket, the wrapper and the sacker which you use as the bed linen. That way, they will die. If we had the soap, you would have washed everything. Tonight, you would have slept in peace.”

 

“It is already cold; shaving my hair will literally do nothing but kill me. Who is going to feed your goats then?” I suggested keeping the hair because my friends would laugh at me when my mum shaved me with the Laser Blade. She would shave more on one part, making it sparkling clean like Jet Lee had in his movies, while the other side of my head would still have hair on it like the grasses at the Bingu stadium. Of course, I was not lying with the excuse of the coldness, but the main reason was the type of shaving. But I did not want to disappoint her in any way.

 

It was so early in the morning, the grasses dropping some little showers (dew) which wet the ground. The tall grasses bathed me like a modern shower. What would I do? If not obeying my precious mum? By that time, my brother was at school, and I was the only one who would go to shepherd the goats because my little brother was just a month old.

 

“Kwende aku-Let us go this side.” it made me cry, especially when the goats would not hear my voice – “My sheep hear my voice” Matt. 1 v 2. They were stolen, not mine. Running through the bushy hill to feed the goats, which were the source of our wealth and food, got me weary, but we had no other option. Besides that, with an empty stomach, which would drum my intestines. When passing through the woods, fields, and other people’s gardens, I had to make sure that no goat ate the maize, the sweet potatoes and the other plants in the fields or the bamboo.

 

Sometimes, I would go there by myself or with my friend or friends. We would leave the goats eating the grasses while we were busy searching for the sweet potatoes, the sugar cane, the maize, and the groundnuts, which were the leftovers in the fields or the bamboo. We would take the Matches and light the fire where we would roast the mentioned food. Sometimes, we would eat raw food since we lacked match sticks or a lighter unless a bush was on fire; that was when we would light the fire. That was our food for that day. We would take some at home, especially the sweet potatoes, to share with our families.

 

There are times and moments when we would quarrel and part ways. For instance, I went to the mountain where there was a green pasture. Someone moved my goats from that pasture, and he moved his goats in there while I was busy searching for some sweet potatoes (we agreed that he would look after the goats, and we went to search for food).

 

Then, I came back, only to find out that my goats were not there. I searched for them only to find out that one goat died at the spot because it tasted the tarmac from the field, which was close to the mountain. The other ones were weak and vomiting mucus. Fortunately, I had some salt, which I diluted and gave them, and they became a little bit stronger. I just rushed and pushed him to the ground with the mud from the wet and dusty ground. I was full of anger, and I hit him as hard as I could to the extent that the other girl had to pull me to stop me. He was three years older than me.

 

When I was younger, I would not tolerate people taking me for granted, either through their silly jokes or through their misbehaviour to hurt me or anyone close to me. I would punch them in the face if they were my age or a few years different. For the older people, I would tell them plainly where they went wrong, and in trying to correct them, they regarded me as rude since it is considered that older people do not make mistakes against young people. My joy was that I communicated to them, and whether they liked it or not was none of my business then.