The past few days I have been feeling sick, felt lots of pains in joints and headaches, and at first I had thought it was just fatigue from the great farming job I have done since my return from the city that would soon go away. But it got worse, I had a fever and the pain in the muscles, the joints was excruciating. The headache had now progressed from the mild one I had been feeling to something else entirely. Last Friday, early in the morning after breakfast I took myself to the village health facility and got tasted.
It wasn’t COVID-19, relax, but something equally worse. Malaria. I had malaria. It was no surprise, this region is a malaria endemic region and having been in Nairobi where there’s no malaria for that long, I was bound to get it. It was only a matter of time.
Well, from the hospital in my face mask and heavily ladened with malaria medication, I made a stop at this place I had made a mental note to stop by later and take a few pictures as I trudged along the village path.
It was the place where a giant teak tree, or iroko, or locally mvule tree had once stood. The tree had been massive; towering above the village like the tower of Babel. Growing up, me and my friends would pass by that tree and just dwell under its auro, wondering whether there was any man alive who could shin that tree. It was so tall that it could be seen from various points of the village.
Then one day the owner, or the one whose land the mvule tree stood decided selfishly cut it down and get timber from it. I was in highschool then, around 2009, and when I returned and found it no more I really felt sad.
The tree had been too big that the owner was unable to consume it all: the branches as big as a medium sized tree had been left to dry for firewood. I had gone to college in the city and had forgotten about the tree until today, when I saw those roots by the same old village path looking like giant elephant tusks.
I felt nostalgic after seeing those gigantic roots that were obviously too stubborn to decompose, still lying there to remind passersby of what the village and the world has lost.