Ifee
Dear God,
Back then in our primary school days, my immediate elder sister was an item. I guess she still is till date, but in a more matured way.
She was a fast talker, agile, and more daring than your average girl.
Majority of her friends were either male or much older than she was because she was much more advance than most of the girls in her age group.
She had no fear.
She could out talk, out run and win practically any fight in school then.
The group of us who lived within the same streets and vicinity always went home from school as a group. This was to forestall any bullying of the weaker ones out in the open.
This was in the era when we children walked to and from school by ourselves. The younger ones had to wait for the older ones to break off from school and we all trouped home enmasse.
That was the great old days, Not this new age where a school had to practically go bankrupt to provide buses to pick school children, and parents break their backs doing school runs.
Now, for some reasons which I never knew, there was often a fighting competition on the way back from school some days.
Each “street cliché” had to sustain or regain or attain some level of relevance by winning a fight.
And each cliché had to put forward to represent them, the child they believed would win whatever contest they could come up with.
My sister hardly fought, but trust me, she was always in the thick of things, planning, plotting and helping sabotage whoever they wanted to.
If a team really wanted to win very badly, they had to seek her support, even to the extent of coming to our house a day before to agree on an action plan with her. Or staying long in the streets when we all go to fetch water just to plot out the delivery plan for the next contest.
One fateful day their plots backfired on them. They didn’t see it coming.
Dwarfs were not common in those days so my sister probably had never seen one. So when the opponents featured dwarf, she didn’t know any better. In fact, they laughed their hearts out. This particular boy didn’t really look like your average dwarf, he looked more like an underdeveloped boy and her team accepted the challenge and featured their best.
I am not sure the referee even finished stating the rules, before we knew it, the little boy picked up my sister’s priced fighter (a boy 4x his size) and suspended him in the air for what seemed like forever.
The rule to win a fight was to throw your opponent to the ground and pack sand into his/her mouth.
That wasn’t necessary, he stood there with the boy in the air and we all gaped.
Even his team members had to join in begging for him to drop the boy. It was mind blowing.
My sister was totally confounded. For once I saw something that shocked her.
I learnt a great lesson that day:
“It’s not always the size of the dog in a fight, but the size of the fight in a dog”
I felt so much fear for the boy when his team pushed him out, I thought he would be beaten silly.
I don’t know if my sister learnt anything, she was so fixated with getting her team back to prime again.
I Learnt never to underestimate anyone, to every man, a gift is given.
We all wrote that boy off, we all did.
I learnt to stay calm in the face of manipulation and plots of the opposition, because “What will be will be” You got me covered. You always know the end before the beginning.
I learnt that all that glitters is not Gold so I value inner strength, and am weary of the outer obvious.
Thank You Lord.
This is Your daughter, I am checking in.
