Coffee converstaions with Ameena #2

If we were having coffee, I will tell you all about living with my grandma’s cats for the past two weeks. How they have become a sort of exposure therapy to me, for my animal phobia. I will tell you how they are a “neighborhood wonder” because they‘ve lived for four years on these streets and have successfully evaded the popular “cat-nappers” of the neighborhood. I will tell you how the two cats, are always fighting, with each other and with the neighborhood cats as well. They often come back with fresh injuries… and I will tell you, despite their constant fighting, and bloodied skin, my grandma loves them all the same.

If we were having coffee, I will tell you how I’ve been called out by four people this week, for reading messages and procrastinating my replies. It’s funny how, the one we want to talk to, doesn’t give us the time of the day, and then those who need to talk to us, we rightly ignore. I will tell you that, moving forward, I will try to put into practice, the  quote “choose the people who choose you”.

If we were having coffee, I will tell you how I felt like an oversabi for being the only doctor in the entire hospital who wore a lab coat to work. I felt like the butt of the hospital’s joke- “here comes the lab-coat wearer”. I will tell you how I got a message from a fellow doctor, after airing my grievances, and safe to say, now, I am a proud lab-coat wearer. Funny, how a simple statement, word, phrase from another human being, is enough to put things into perspective for us. Words truly are magic.

If we were having coffee, I will apologize midway for talking too much and for taking multiple cups of coffee in this brief time, because it’s been a multiple cups of coffee kind of week. I will unburden to you how everywhere I look around in this part of Nigeria I am living, I see decades of failed governance. I see failed governance in the girls roaming the streets during school hours, in the drug ridden youths, in the women who still use the dangerous “ajinomoto salt” to cook because they can’t afford the healthier varies, in the poorly equipped hospitals, in the underage pregnant women, in the mentally unstable people with little knowledge and no access to mental health practitioners.

If we were having coffee, I will lighten up the conversation and ask you if you celebrate Valentine’s Day or not. If you do, I’d ask what you are planning on giving your special someone this valentines day or what you are planning on doing for yourself on that day. I would tell you about all the books I’ve read so far this month and the books I am planning on reading as well. I would ask you about the books you’ve read and encourage you to tell me all about them.

If we were having coffee, I will thank you for taking the time out to listen to me and I hope we could fix another coffee date next week, when we’re both free.

If we were having coffee, what would you like to say? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below