As I leaned on the windowsill of the office kitchen, I looked out towards the water fountain made of eleven holes periodically springing from the recently completed place Guillaume. Both the young and the old found immerse joy in the newly installed water fountain. The Instagrammers and tik-tokers took videos and photos for their social media sites while the children ran bare-footed through the fountain either completely naked or with pampers. It brought a smile to my face as the children tried to hit the water with their tiny arms and legs while screaming at the top of their lungs.

For a while, I was taken aback and started reminiscing on my own childhood days. That was many years ago but I still remembered that back then, there was more work than play but we still found joy in the mandatory farm work. During planting season, we would sing and jump over the harrowed land, while during harvest, we would play hide and seek in the high stacked maize sheaves

We would bare-footedly be running after each other, screaming and jumping while throwing our little hands upwards and tilting our heads towards the sky. We would welcome the first rain drops with closed eyes and our outstretched tongues and we would taste the sweet rain. The smell of the dry dusty earth being caressed by the first drops of rain remains one of my favourite smells to this day.

From the side-lines, it seemed like rain welcoming ritual. The rain would gain momentum and the harder it hit our small bodies, the wilder we would scream and ran around the now muddied water. We would be drenched in rain water down to our bones.

The only thing that would stop us from the fun would be the periodical calls from our aunts and mothers who would be shouting our names through the downpour. Soaked wet to the core, we would receive scolding and a lecture on how we would get a cold.  As a child, getting a cold was the least of our worries. We would be guided directly to the bathroom while being strictly forbidden to touch anything with our tiny muddied hands. We would then be washed and placed near the fire place in the cooking area.

Between the planting and harvesting seasons, the after-school meeting point for all children in the neighbourhood was the playground. From there we would embark on different adventures. The choices were endless but the most common ones were playing house, climbing fruit trees, playing hide and seek, swimming at the stream. The responsibilities of where we slept, what we wore or what we ate was none of our concerns. When there was no food at home, we would eat at the neighbours, when we were tired, we would sleep at the exact spot where sleep found us mostly in the high grasses. Clothes and shoes were non-essentials for us. The only concern we had was school, home works and how long we could play.

The sad reality of life is when we become adults and these joys are replaced by adult responsibilities of life. The lucky ones find a way to re-kindle these small joys, they mostly get titles like “old but young at heart” or the negative titles like “childish” one way or the other I hope we all find a way to rekindle that old flame because most of the time, that could be only way to retain sanity.

Well, time to go back to my responsibilities.

Yours

Nessa

Photo by Achilles Kastanas: https://www.pexels.com/photo/water-dew-photography-771730/