us heartily.
He embraces and kisses my mummy in
the presence of
Toyosi who is smiling.
“Husband and wife, open the door and
kiss,” Toyosi
says and laughs.
“Go and meet your husband too, Toyosi,”
my father
says.
When my mummy tells me all these, I
doubt it.
“Are you sure Toyosi is happy with us
now?” I ask her.
“Didn’t you see it with your eyes
yesterday?” mummy
replies me.
“But this is strange and so sudden, how
come?”
“That’s the miracle of God,” says
mummy. “Don’t you
know that when the way of a person
pleases God he
will make his enemies to be at peace with
him?”
But Toyosi didn’t tell us the reason why
she had to
change her mind towards us suddenly
like that. Bode
hasn’t changed a bit, yet his mother did
warn him not to
continue misbehaving towards us.
It is holiday period, so I spend all my
time at home
enjoying myself. Daddy isn’t bothering
me anymore.
Infact he is a changed man too. I think
he is behaving
according to Toyosi’s dictate. She has
told him to be
kind to us because we are his legitimate
family and not
herself.
Mummy shares the testimony in her
church of what God
has done to her; how God has changed
her husband’s
heart. My church is a large one. I didn’t
even know my
mum is up there on the podium sharing
her testimony
until I begin to see the interpretation of
her testimony
in sign language; how would I have
known she is up
there when the church has relegated we,
the special
ones so called, to the back of the
Church? I have asked
our ‘deaf and dumb’ interpreter a
question once, during
question and answer session after our
Sunday school.
“The topic today is Show Love Without
Discrimination,
ma, but why don’t I see the love in our
church here?” I
ask.
“What do you mean?” she asks me.
“According to the Bible Reading, it is
stated that it is
wrong to tell one person sit here while
you tell another
person come over to this high seat. But
why is it that
we deaf and dumb in this church have to
sit far away
from the stage like this?”
The interpreter smiles. She must have
been thinking of
what to reply.
“Hmm…” she smiles. “Rose, it is to avoid
distraction,
that’s why? If we do our service close to
them, they
will be distracted with the movements of
our hands.”
“I disagree!” I barge in. “Why are we not
also
distracted with the movement of their
mouths? We
don’t hear the sound of their mouths, our
hand
movements don’t produce any sound too,
we only get
to see each other, that’s all. It’s fifty-
fifty!”
She becomes mute. But that was not all.
I still have
more to say in rage:
“Why can’t the preacher even be
preaching in sign
language and someone should be
interpreting to them
in voice language? This is also
discrimination!”
Everyone laughed that day in the deaf
and dumb class
and I was rechristened ‘Miss
Discrimination’.
To be continued
