If the car is not yours, don’t push back the seat

Dear nephew Milambo

Greetings from this land where betrayal can happen from someone you really trust.

I hope that by the grace of Limatunda you and your small family are doing fine under the watchful eyes of the ancestors led by our very own Chief Mirambo.

I hope too that all the people in my beloved Ukumbisiganga are doing fine and that Liwelelo has been watching over them.

Here in the city things are okay, nothing much to report, and we thank the Nyamwezi gods for granting us peace and good health.

We also thank Limatunda for our beautiful continent my dear son, because just the other day I was watching in the news how several countries are experiencing something called ‘heat wave’.

I know it might sound like a strange word to you my dear son, but from what I gathered, heat wave is a period of abnormally hot weather generally lasting more than two days. Heat waves can occur with or without high humidity. They have potential to cover a large area, exposing a high number of people to hazardous heat.

My dear son, I usually complain about the heat that usually descends on this city, and how sometimes it drives me crazy, but then I realised that here in Africa, Tanzania especially, we have the best weather in the world.

I was watching how people suffer under the terrible heat, and they reported that several people lost their lives, and I was wondering what would have happened if it happened in our beloved country.

I was watching with that doctor friend of mine after we had gone to visit an ailing friend, and he said that rapid rises in heat gain due to exposure to hotter than average conditions compromise the body’s ability to regulate temperature and can result in a cascade of illnesses, including heat cramps, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and hyperthermia….and death.

I remember so many years ago, almost 30 years now, I was told of a heat wave which happened in America, which killed an estimated 692 people and sent at least 3,300 people to the emergency room. An observational study of some of those patients revealed that 28 per cent who were diagnosed at the time with severe heat stroke had died within a year of being admitted to the hospital, and most who initially survived the high temperatures had permanent loss of independent function.

We have all the reason to thank Limatunda my dear son, because I was trying to imagine the number of people who would head to their ancestors if it happened in my beloved Ukumbisiganga.

Your aunt sends her greetings my dear boy, and yesterday she told me that she might be coming to Tabora at the end of this month because she will be having a seminar.

She says that if the trip materialises, she will make sure that she meets you and your wife before she returns, and I am sure she might facilitate for you and your wife and baby girl to join her in Tabora town.

I am sure she is looking forward to that trip because I know for a fact that she misses that daughter of yours terribly, because we all know how deeply in love she is with your baby girl.

I will just beg you to make sure you give your aunt my package of tobacco to bring to me, because once again I can see my stock is slowly running out.

Make sure you give her enough because there is a certain chap here who has fallen in love with that tobacco, and he always comes and borrow from me.

My dear son, last night we slept very late, me and your aunt, because we had to rescue a certain girl from being sent to her ancestors by her irate husband who was accusing her of infidelity.

The girl and her husband are a very young couple, because I understand they have a one-year-old daughter, and they moved into our neighbourhood a few weeks ago.

What happened is that this fellow has his own car, and his wife also has her own car, but that day the fellow’s car developed some mechanical problem when he wanted to leave the office in the evening.

Because they both work in town, the fellow decided to go to his wife’s office so that they can use her car to return home…which is a very normal thing if you look at it.

But the problem, is when the wife went with the car key to the parking lot, she handed it to her husband so that he could be the one driving the car.

The problem started when the husband entered his wife’s car and found the driver’s seat pulled back.

Without saying anything, he asked his wife if she was the one who drove the car from home to her office, and when she said that indeed she was the one who drove it, that is where the problem started.

You see son, this woman, the wife of that fellow, is a very short woman, so according to her husband, it is impossible for her to drive the car with the seat pulled back the way it was, because with her height she wouldn’t even reach the steering wheel, therefore it was obvious that someone taller was the one who drove the car.

Of course the husband made sense in his argument, but according to the fellow, the short wife tried to argue that she was the one who drove the car.

They started their battle before leaving town, and when they reached home, the fellow was ready to continue with the verbal war before it turned into a physical war.

Murder was written on that poor fellow’s face when he rushed into our compound to drag his wife back home after she came to us with her dress torn to pieces.

“I respect you and your wife very much sir, because of the age difference, but this woman has been cheating on me, and she has a boyfriend who is her workmate, who always drives her car when she leaves home, because he leaves along the way to her office,” said the angry husband, who said that he got this information from reliable sources after finding the driver’s seat pulled back.

This city my son has very strange things!