HUMOUR : “Perhaps I have No Heart at all”

Maybe it is getting time the Villager retires from the hectic lifestyle of this city of ours. It is increasingly becoming very difficult to have a roof over one’s head, leave alone having a round meal. All we have to do is to simply double all our efforts with hope that, other things will remain constant (ceteris peribus). This “beast” they call the “Economic Crunch” or is it crush, has still got its tentacles tightly twisted over many of our lives; if we are not careful, it may sink its “fangs” into our defenceless lives, inshallah, we shallsurvive! I don’t know why there is a lot of hullaballoo about theeconomic situation being better, many countries are posting positive figures but aren’t they the same ones that are responsible for the same monster? As they say, “When America (read USA) sneezes, the rest of the world catches the cold”, or better put, “when America catches swine flu, the rest of the world gets quarantined”. This reminds me of one of Mr. M7’s endless list of proverbs, that, “an old mama peed on agashishi (tinny insect) and it responded that, it had survived many rain storms, what about this drizzle?” Tough moments come and go but tough people last! As I was saying, due to the hectic nature of life, we now have adjusted our “work clocks” to read “Open from 07:00Am till 05:30Pm”; whereas others are now running till 10:00Pm or Open 24hours, if you think I lie, go to Nakumatt, it opens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year! What about you? In this bid, the village has decided to work for close to eighteen hours a day, leaving only six hours for sleep. In spite of all this, I cannot make the ends meet, as soon as the ends are about to meet, something comes in and the ends move further apart than they were before! With all these frustrations, we keep deceiving ourselvesor rather “morale boosting”, with the hope that, “the good old days” will once again come back!There is this thing they call fate (the explanation of the unexplainable), it always hits when one least expects it to. It shatters dreams, destroys livelihoods and may even take lives away! As the villager was busy attending one of these unending meetings,something struck him such that, he had unbearable pain in the left side of the chest. I turned to look behind as if trying to see who hadstabbed me in the back but there was nobody! At that juncture, I could neither turn nor lift or lower my arm. Maybe it was an invisible person with an invisible knife trying to take my life, eh! After about half an hour, I managed to command my rusty bones to get me out of that room or else they would never see any light again. I slowly walked out and called a friend of mine who drove me to a Clinic near Remera’s Kisementi shopping district. On arriving at the clinic, I narrated my tribulations to the Doc and he wrote me a referral to go to either Sihasika (CHUK) or Fayizo (Faysal), I opted to go to Sihasika for personal and economical reasons. I was supposed to go through a machine at the department called URGENCE or is it URGENCY? When I arrived, I was told to come back the next morning as they could not simply carry out a test without me seeing the doctor and since it was past midday, I had no choice! Luckily enough, the godamn pain had also gone! I waited for the morning; come 07:00Am, I was at Sihasika, I managed to see the Doc in the hour before midday and he sent me to the heart machine from where they wired my legs, hands and the chest and plugged me to some electrical device that should draw a graph but it was drawing nothing! The machine attendant had o call in the Doctor who got puzzled too. They tried out the machine on someone else and it worked well but on me,wapi! I could see the worry in the doctor’s eyes, “perhaps I have noheart at all?”, I asked the doctor! Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm