BY CHARLES K.T.GINDALANG
Seated under the shadow of his home Kitchen, Abye Nashema, wipes the tears from his eyes as he struggles to pose for his photograph against protests from his daughter.
“Stop taking his picture,” Salwa, the daughter washing dishes nearby, tells the journalist. “You have to ask my mother first.”
“What is wrong with the picture?” Nashema asks her.
24-HOUR COMA
Nashema supports himself with a walking stick to change positions. He also crawls. “I crawl if the ground is favorable – not hot, not wet – and if my knee is not paining,” he says.
Both legs are para- lyzed.
Nashema was not al- ways disabled. In fact, he was flying high until two years ago.
Nashema was walking to the ministry of Agriculture, but woke up 24 hours later in a hospital. “What happened?” he asked his daughter who was standing beside
him.
“Don’t worry, you are not going to die,” the doctor responded. “Just calm down. You are at Juba Teaching Hospital.” A car had hit him.
Nashema was afraid he would not make it.
Nashema had worked as an engineer, for 20 years, with the Central Equatoria State ministry of agriculture. He fixed tractors and water pumps, yet he was now powerless to fix his legs. The ministry laid him off, paid him a monthly salary for the next six months, and promised a retirement package. “I got some money for med- icine from the Ministry, and , they did promise to pay my pension, but I am really even tired of fol- low up. Here, you see, I’m stuck, a crippled man. It is hard to follow up since I can’t walk. I mostly do call my co-workers using my wife’s cell phone, but their answers are mostly the same reply: ’nothing is there’.”
FIXING TRACTORS AND WATER pUMPS
If you go to Nashema’s home, you’re sure to find him.
One day, he’s crawling to the latrine.
Another day, he’s seated on a chair, and only a young girl is in the compound to cook for him. She’s his daughter.
Most anyone living around Rock City seems to know Nashema.
“Oh, that cripple liv- ing near that big house,” says one woman when asked about Nashema.
“He has a young girl who always cooks, cleans, and washes his clothes.”
Nashema has two children. The son, Dan- iel Lukudu Wodu, is a secondary student; the daughter, Salwa, attends primary school.
Salwa is busy cooking. The wife and the sister provide for the family and pay school fees.
“This is our actual problem: I can’t pay school fees for my two children,” Nashema says. “My wife is the one struggling for our children school fees and when she fall short of money then my sister jump in supporting. The other problem is that sometimes we sleep hungry.”
Abye rose to the rank of an engineer through experience. After he fin- ished high school, he re- alized that he was good at fixing generators and tractors. He started as an assistant mechanic before rising through the ranks.
“My life has become a burden to my wife and sister,” he says. “The day we eat, we are happy; and the day we don’t eat, we just pray to God. And these days, you give me money,” he says refer- ring to earlier help given him by the reporter long before he decided to write about Nashema. “I think it was God answer- ing my prayers.”
