Humour: The Villager: “Doing this and that”

Nowadays having a job is synonymous with sitting in office, punching a few figures on your key board, barking orders here and there, sipping some coffee, going on business trips and then wait for the month to end and get paid. Many of us go through paramount pain to survive by doing very risky jobs not get paid. I now realise how wrong our way of thinking is and how we meander on the wrong paths only to miss the right paths because we do not know what we are looking for. Like wise, we jump on the bandwagons without knowing what we are doing. When I was young, my “mother on the steps” (step mum), always employed the services of either a young boy or girl, and she normally called a house girl (irrespective of his / her sex). Talk about sex and it reminds me of a young woman who went to get a new travel document from the Immigration or some department similar to that. While filling out the forms, she filled in her names well, dates of birth and marital status. When it came to the “Sex” check box, she simply wrote “five times a week”! I sincerely pity the luck or is it unlucky her husband. Sincerely, if such was my mock, I would fret, how can a son of a villager cope eh? Hmmh!! Most of us ran away from the villages to towns and cities in a bid to secure what we perceived as jobs or better employment opportunities. In my long pursuit of the so called good jobs, I haven’t seen any, I’m now planning to retire from job seeking and turn to something else. In the olden days, when I used to cook waragi, I was more “fluid” that the son of a chief. Despite the risks involved in the trade, like drums (distillery) busting and taking the “cooker” with it, the occupational hazards were much less compared to the profits one made after a successful night of distilling. Some of us, who are old enough on this column, may recall the fate of a one “Katu”. This was a veteran (not like the ones from the armed forces), maybe, what they shared in common were a few things like, working in a highly explosive environment, playing with fire and retiring as a casualty. By the way, this guy (Katu), was a father or may I say, a star of “waragi cookers” (distillers), many of us learnt the art from him. All villagers were merely “fatanyaoring (following in the footsteps). The days of “cooking waragi” were indeed fun days. We only looked at the profit that was to be made and not the risks involved. This old veteran (Katu) was hit by the drum several times, sometimes he would get admitted in the hospital for a period ranging from a couple of days to weeks, but every time he recovered, he would quickly mobilise resources and return to work as soon as possible. Unlike old Katu, most of us resorted to the distilling industry as a way of making quick bucks here and there to supplement our poor parent’s means of raising school fees. Many of our comrades worked hard to earn their own school fees. Forget the spoilt kids of these days that look upon their parents to feed, cloth and educate them. When I was not “cooking waragi”, I would be engaged in other gainful activities like fishing, trading in any sort of goods (legal and illegal), that would yield me the much needed revenue. There was a common saying that, an infraction of the law is not one until you are caught! Many times, we used to ferry planks of timber on our heads to the shores of Lake Albert’s landing sites of Ntoroko and Kanara, we sometimes shipped our merchandise across the lake to the border island of Rukwanzi. When our merchandise got held up, we would take part time jobs as fishermen or rather “fishing turn boys”, and set sail in the hour or so before midnight and keep on the lake till the first hours of dawn. Though it was a risky venture, there was nothing to lose; after all there was money to be earned. Imagine many of us who used to come from as far as thirty kilometres to the lake shores, we had no swimming skills whatsoever and yet, here we were offering ourselves as easy human sacrifices for the hungry lake to claim. Luckily enough for me, for the time I spent “working” on the lake, I nearly became a lake’s prey only once. By the way, it is an open secret that, whenever there is a bad storm and you are trapped at sea, the experienced seamen have the nose to smell out the one responsible for the storm. In their jargon, they say that, the lake is “hungry” and wants to “swallow” so and so, once your name is mentioned, you are thrown overboard, into the lake in a bid to calm the waters. This tradition is as old as history and is practiced on all waters world over. Next time, if time allows, I may tell you about my escape from the “jaws” of the lake. As for now, I better get going, its time for one one. Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm