Not Broken...

By Kasalobi .

Kasalobi was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A french speaking country. He became a teacher at Boboto college after graduating from IPN, the national school of pedagogy in Kinshasa. As streets photographer, he made enough money to put himself back in school at ISC, an accounting college. That diploma led him to find a night job at Kinshasa Ndolo airport, there he started taking flying lessons with his boss' Cessna 150. The political situation in his native Congo obliged him to seek for asylum in the United States. That trip allowed him to accumulated flying hours at Acme school of Aeronautics at Meacham Field airport, in Fort Worth Texas. He later took his aviation ground school and his aviation technology at Mountain View College in Dallas Texas where he also studied correspondence, writing and reading. That helped him to become a reporter and DJ on the African Ambiance show at KNON radio, 89.3 FM. As one of the representatives of Congolese Community of Dallas and Fort Worth, Kasalobi co-wrote the community by-law and created l' Africana, a Congolese driving school. He lives in Hurst Texas and loves to travel, reason why he graduated from Swift University, a Phoenix Arizona transportation company at Lancaster Texas. Including Mexico and Canada, he is a US 48 states Swift truck driver. Kasalobi is an active internet Congolese political analyst and a full time writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479749324

Kasalobi .

Kasalobi was born in province of Katanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A French speaking country. He became a teacher at Boboto College after graduating from IPN, the national school of pedagogy in Kinshasa. As streets photographer, he made enough money to put himself back in school at ISC, an accounting college. That diploma led him to find a night job at Kinshasa Ndolo Airport. There, he started taking flying lessons on his boss' Cessna 150. The political situation in his native Congo obliged him to seek for asylum in the United States. That trip allowed him to accumulated flying hours at Acme School of Aeronautics at Meacham Field Airport, in Fort Worth Texas. He later took his aviation ground school and his aviation technology at Mountain View College in Dallas Texas where he also studied correspondence, writing and reading. These classes helped him to become a reporter and a DJ on the African Ambiance show, at KNON 89.3 FM radio. As one of the representatives of Congolese Community of Dallas and Fort Worth, Kasalobi co-wrote the community by-law. He created l' Africana, a Congolese driving school in Dallas. He lives in Hurst Texas. He loves to travel, reason why he graduated from Swift University, a Phoenix Arizona Swift transportation company. Including Mexico and Canada, he is a US 48 states Eighteen wheeler driver. Kasalobi is an active internet political analyst. He is a full time writer. Not-Broken is his first exciting release. It is a must book to read, a moving and a true story based on his own thrilling experience. In this book, Kasalobi goes back to Africa, looking for Sico, his first teenager love. Despites lot of difficulties, he brings her with him in this United States. He pays her nursing classes. When Sico graduates, she flips on him. This did not break Kasalobi's heart. He stood up from the canvas and then dusted his pants. Is he really okay? This is his fight as conveyed in Not-Broken.

Book preview

Part I

Washing a dry head is simply a waste of soap.

A tabby appearance to a cracked heel won’t help the fissures.

- Mopero wa Maloba, Congolese artist

Chapter 1

THE WAR WITHIN

There are two wars in every human being’s heart: one is love, the other is hate. This is the fulfilled wisdom from the mind of Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh, a Cherokee chika. She gave me that deserved piece of advice about Odia Sico, the woman I loved and who loved me back; the woman who swore under the smiling moon that she will marry me. Odia Sico pledged to be forever faithful to me, as we were getting ready to get married.

I met Qi, again, in Papago Indian reservation at the crossroads limiting the city of Yuma and the population sign of the city of Tucson, in Arizona. It was during a cold snowy wind of November.

Qi is a distinct intellectual and a prudent individual. Her father is a Navajo from the Opy-Zuni tribe. She was given birth by a Comanche from the Kakoo family. This combination made her a strong woman and a wise scholar. Qi was still living with both her parents when we met. When I first saw her, she told me that they all were living up in the Ute Mountains, in Utah. Her grandparents, uncles and aunties, her cousins and nieces, even friends, they all lived together in the same compound. For them the family was not the father, the mother including children. The family was what we call here in America ‘the extended family’; uncles, cousins and others. The father, mother, brothers and sisters were just that; father and mother, brothers and sisters. They lived together not as an extended family but as a family. I said to her that that is exactly what it is in the part of Africa where I am from.

Before she gave me that ‘two wars in the heart’ piece of advice, she asked me who Odia Sico was. I answered and said that she is this pretty little thing I loved very much when we were still back in Africa. I loved her before she was even a preteen. Then, our lives took apart in different directions. We met again under strange circumstances in Kinshasa, the city capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We travelled all the way from Africa to United States, using different means. Here, in this great country, she started disappointing me, again.

You did not get the question. Who is Odia Sico for you to keep having white nights and headaches for? Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh interrupted me before I even finished.

When I first met her, Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh was a lawyer. The last time I checked, she still was. She is still practicing. Our incidental meeting happened in middle of US 175. She was going down to the valley, in San Benito, Texas, to one of her big trials. I was driving to Nacogdoches, Texas, looking for Mumu and Veydha, my little girls. Those two innocent little things were stolen from me by Sheebah, their mother.

That day, while my foot was hurriedly accelerating my red extended cab Ford Escort, even if it was also been driven in part with the help of my eyes, my entire head was not fully getting involved. I was lost in daydreams, driving off the road, and hitting curbside bumps at the same time. I started to wonder if I was not losing my mind. That was when I began to looking into myself to see what was going on. There I found out that my brain was simply preparing itself to a swing that would make sense when I will meet with my two little birdies. It was, furthermore, gathering arguments that could support a fight, when I would be talking to their mother, on what would happen if she ever refused to let them come back home with me. Thinking about their mother, because of the hate I built for her in my heart, my hands started cramping harder and harder on the wheel. As I was approaching Reese Texas city limit, my mouth became irritated. It set my lips in motion. Instinctively, I started talking loudly to myself on what would be said if I ever found them hurt. It was at that moment that, like in the trailers of Stephen King’s best of Halloween scary movies, I saw, out the blue, a fat flying rope. It was spraying blood everywhere as it was approaching in, from nowhere. I thought, for a moment there that, it was a living string that was falling from dark places. That was the incident that introduced me to Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh.

She witnessed the same thing, almost. From her driving position, she saw, not a chubby rope, but a bloody animal. That animal was coming down toward me. What she saw was a long drooping pigtail. It was flying, not by flapping wings like a bird but by flopping around. It was drooping toward my car. While screaming, she stopped her vehicle on the left shoulder of the road because she observed the thing hit my windshield with such impact that it generated a loud noise and a big blow. That blow put my brain on alert. What we saw was a snake. It woke me up from my daydreams. But my hands stayed still constricted on the steering wheel. I crossed over the curb side. With my right middle finger, I switched my wipers on. Instead of having it thrown off, the wipers spread that snake blood, all over the windshield. Slowly, I moved my tires on the surface of the road and sharply pulled over and crossed back over the curved side. I finally took control of my 1998 Ford Escort, my Friend Eight.

I had this Ford Escort since 1998, Year and Make and I still have it. Together, we saw every continental State of the entire United States, beside Florida. The special thing about it is that when I was drunk, which was almost every day, it drove itself home. It drove me home. When I woke up from my drunkenness, I was safely inside. So many times, I asked myself how that happened. Well, the answer was simple; it drove itself home, with me inside, seriously. It protected me against my own insanities so much so that I believed it had a spirit of its own. With the time, that Ford Escort became my friend. This was the main reason I always called it, my Friend Eight. I never let anybody drive it. So, using both my hands, I took control of My Friend Eight. At that moment, the snake was already tangled up all around my windshield blades.

Meanwhile as I was taking control of my friend Eight, a well dressed lady was still observing the same animal as it was twisting itself on my windshield. She was observing it from the other side of the road. Before safely stopping her vehicle on the left shoulder of the road, she literally jumped out, still shouting, and left her driver side door opened. She dangerously crossed the median over, and came to investigate. The driver of the car behind hers jumped in and set the brakes. On her way across, before even reaching the front of my 1998 Ford Escort, she began mimicking my car wipers movements using both her hands. She did not stop screaming. There, she put her right hand on her head, as if she was trying to pull off some attacking African bees from the top, messing up her hair at same time. The lady was very moved because of that happening. From where I was standing, I observed the glasses on her face. They were drawing out her attractiveness in a clever way. Her body was well equipped with good things and looks. She was about five foot tall and stood that height perfectly.

She explained what she saw. The snake was not flying, it was run over by an eighteen wheeler that probably did not have mud flaps, she said. Her side of story did not stick first, but I listened to her yapping. Still, I did not believe her explanations, not because she looked disturbed at this point, but because the more I watched her gesticulating, the more she was stuttering like a thunder on a rainy night. That made her more outstanding. For that reason, I paid more attention to her beauty. The more I looked at her body’s small details, the more I started to believe her testimony. And because she did not stop talking, things started to make sense. By the time I really paid attention to her speech, my eyes began devouring her. Her beauty, not her words, convinced me. She said that because of the speed of the turning tires, the crushed body of the snake did not weight all a lot, it did not have a hold on the concrete. It was ejected in the air and landed on my windshield.

I combined everything she said to the way she said them, I added my observation of her Indian garments she was wearing with pride, and saw something in her. There, I remembered who I was; an African. The message coming out from her dresses was great. It was not made to be understood by just anyone who was coming from the street, or someone who did not go through the African initiation. What I really saw in her that day was something, it was a phenomenon and a thing people do not see every day. The Indian outfits on her were an observable fact that marked a spot in my mind. She introduced herself and said; Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh, my friends call me Qi. We talked about that snake and about other things. Qi made my day that day. She showed me the other face of my life and temporarily took my mind away from the hate of my daughters’ mother that was eating my heart. I swiftly became her friend. Unexpectedly we became good friends because where I was coming from, my people respect our tradition, Qi represented hers with pride. Since then, every time I needed an advice, I called her because she was easy to talk to. She also was an open book.

We met again in Papago India reservation, on a snowy day of November 2006, at cross roads between the city of Yuma and Tucson, Arizona. Where, with her governor Sarah Palin cheery cheekbones on her face, stunningly attractive, she said to me that I missed her question. She said, You did not get the question. Who is Odia Sico for you to keep having white nights and headaches for? I tried to answer, but we mostly talked about her. For a lawyer, she had good ideas. Usually, lawyers do not have good ideas, they do not have hearts. They hurt people. They hurt the very people they are called to defend. They also hurt people they are obliged to prosecute. Either way, they hurt people. Qi was different. She was a polite woman first and she was very nice to me. That day, when we met in Papago Indian reservation, in a cold snowy wind of November, she greeted me by saying Hey you, African.

Hey Chika, my beautiful lady Qi. I answered.

I did not know if it was by law or by choice that, from a Navajo father and a Comanche mother, a talkative woman like her became a Cherokee Chika. Qi was not supposed to be called Chika. My man! I like it better when you call me Qi. Anyway, how is your blood sugar?

Ninety seven and I am not ready to die, if that is what you are insinuating. I answered.

Awesome. Keep on taking care of yourself before doctors start cutting you piece by piece. Do you know that they will start, as always, with your big right toe? From there you will lose your walking balance. When that happened, I will be laughing at you. I will also take a pleasure watching falling down. Qi said jokingly.

Well tomorrow is not even a day that will happen. People think that diabetes is a disease, it is not, and that doesn’t make it less deadly. It is actually a condition of the body when, in one way or the other, the body refuses to properly process its sugar. One thing we will agree with is that diabetes kills. It kills people slowly and silently. It kills them off bit by bit. Anyway, nice meeting you again. She smiled and said.

I like your native outfit. I like your bulky long black hair more; it is perfectly covering your shoulder as if it was a blanket of magnificence. Qi you are beautiful, dazzling beautiful. I said.

I know. Native Indians are always beautiful. It is normal that I show off my things. She answered. She smiled again, put her arms on the top of my shoulders. I leaned forward. We stayed locked. It was cold. I welcomed the heat from her small body and I did not mind how long her small arms stayed my hip.

The Chachisha lodge, a casino restaurant in which we met, was lit by blue and red lights, which darkened the whole inside. It was more of a traditional Indian hand out place than a regular gambling room. Different size Arizona collectibles of dancers, some playing flutes, some with spears in their hands, and jumping men decorated all walls. The conversation became centered on Odia’s last attitude and the way she had changed on me as we sat to eat. I said to Qi that I called Odia an hour before we met. She answered but it seemed that something was wrong. Someone was nearby. That someone was not letting her express herself willingly. At the end of our conversation, when I said I love you, she did not say the usual I love you too. She instead said, I know, which did not mean a whole lot. Do not worry. Qi asked.

It was not in her habit to say me too. That answer of hers worried me to death. She also said that if she doesn’t answer my calls, for the rest of that day, it would be because she will be at a party. Her female coworker bought a house. They will be sharing chips and soft drinks, she said. That sounded like a mundane and innocent talk, but it was not. It was an answer that reinforced my suspicious. She put everything in the means to make me understand. I had to believe my own feelings. I was not amazed when she said ‘her female coworker’. Why did she precisely say that? As I was expressing my doubts to her, Qi looked at me with true considerations. I looked back, the expression on her face told me she was really paying a chosen attention to my grievances. It was here when I noticed that she was wearing only one of her two handmade pieces of jewelry. Is this earring finished out of an animal skin? I asked.

Nope, it is a stone. It looks like that. Mother made it for me. I attached these two white feathers myself. How do I look? She asked reattaching the other piece to the other side of her hair.

With or without them, you are a beauty. I said.

Sico took her gloves off indeed. She said,

The sarcasm in that is that she took them off after I have finished paying the last installment of the loan she took for her nursing classes. She took them off just when I am over the road challenging death, doing my best to meet both month ends for her. She betrayed me. I answered.

After swallowing her last piece of peppered fajita, with her known posed voice, Qi said; There are two wars in every human being’s heart; one is love, the other is hate. The dangerous one is the one you fear the most. Indeed, your Sico met someone new. She wouldn’t otherwise have said a female coworker. She said female to precisely kick your mind off. Phones have different ring tones with dissimilar sounds preset in diverse modes. The reason they are made like that is for situations like this one. As long as what you have does not convince you of her guilt, you and I could only hope to be wrong. Do not talk to her about it and create dormant fires. Dormant fires create issues. In order to avoid these issues and in order to evade accumulating them, you guys need to have an open talk. It is a must because accumulate issues do ignite flames from dormant fires mostly when they remain unsolved. Unsolved issues create mean hate in the couple’s way of life. Hate usually creates distortions in people’s lives. The more you hate someone, the more you think about him. Thinking all the time about the person you hate is loving him differently. This is what we Indians call ‘the third love’. It is called so because it is coming from a cultivated hate. Hate is a love of different kind. The kind that drives you crazy. The kind that brings depression and high blood pressure. The third love does destroy life. So stop fussing about it. She explained.

Whao! It is hard to comprehend a thing when you speak to me as a philosopher. You did not have to repeat yourself that much and use that kind of language.

She did not answer. A silence passed by. She slowly started getting mad as the conversation was going forward. And when Qi is mad, not only she is a piercing beauty, she is also a nerve-racking woman attractive. I wondered, at that moment, why had she been resisted me. She said, long time ago, that I was a handsome man. I quickly responded that she was my preferred type and I liked her size. I said so because I hoped to see that conversation go forward, it did not. She missed noticing my crush for her by a mile. I was okay with who she was; a classy, wealthy, strong and worthy woman. I should have said all that loudly, but what was the point? A real lady is not sensible to these kinds of answers for the reason that she is not a commodity or a piece of merchandise with a price tag. In today society, a lady wants to hear something that touches her heart, not a thing that tells her that she may be a damaged good. She probably was right to stay away from me. She was very sensitive and I was easily hurt. She stayed away because she convinced herself that, I preferred Odia Sico’s prettiness to her exquisiteness. That was probably the reason she stood to just being a friend. As she was visibly getting mad, she took one of the wooden cups from the table and filled it with foamy local malt. She then mixed pineapple chunks and sweet flavored alcoholic beverage in it. I watched her as she brought the cup to her well-designed lips. She swallowed everything once. I said to her; Drink Qi. As long as you are alive, drink because sooner you won’t be able to. As every one of us, your nose and lips will shut off and ants will consume your body. Drink Qi.

Who said that? She asked.

Kasongo Senga, my father. He always said so before drinking.

She smiled, then relaxed. We talked. She connected different thoughts together for me. We cut buffalo meat by hands and ate Indian Tofu, the traditional way. The only time we used the timber spoons was when we sipped the local made corn porridge. Qi thought she saw a dreamer in me. That was a problem. I stopped believing in myself from the moment I suspected Odia of cheating on me, again. There was not a dream in this dreamer she thought I was, but she had warned me numerously about Odia. I showed her signs of having short ears and did not know when to listen to her. I only had myself to blame for not having strong feet on the ground. Nothing stays hidden for long. Cheating is like a pregnancy. No woman has had it hidden in the back. It walks at the front side of the woman’s stomach. Anyway, now that you just learnt not to put your twelve eggs in one basket, I will tell you this; I saw you in my last dream. You were bloody red outside but you did not have a single wound on your body. Qi said.

She spoke a lot and explained less her wisdom. It was hard to guess, with full meaning, everything she spoke of because I was not capable of finishing her phrases. The women rarely dreamed of anything. When she dreamed of something, it curiously happened. She anticipated things that happened to me before, not like a telepathic or a diviner, but as a woman with experiences. She did so to support a visible fact. I had reasons to believe her one more time. She was the only person I knew of who could come up with something after interpreting her dream. I believed her when she continued explaining. Based on what is happening, I saw a woman in my dream. That woman was making the strongest part of your heart bleed and it was not bleeding from the open wounds.

Chapter 2

DO ALL OF US A FAVOR

Qi was talked about Odia who was trading the respect I deserved for what she was thinking was the greener grass on the other side of the fence. It did not matter to me anymore. I was a dead body, and a dead body doesn’t get scared of its own decomposition.

By the time the dinner was over, Qi had only minutes to go and catch her flight to Pensacola, Florida. She had something to do with the January 19, 2008 boxing fight between Roy Jones and Felix Trinidad. Qhwanakc Qi Shetanh knew how to say good bye. It was a long and sweet hug. Then her head started massaging the soft side of my face, just between my nose and my ears. I let her do. We began shaving each other’s cheeks while her hands were walking in my back. I did not mind; it was cold outside. She suddenly said; Anyway, a thing that is supposed to go wrong will eventually go wrong. That woman was not good for you, it shows. Now, go with the spirit of my ancestors.

She held my hands, kneeled to a point of letting her right leg touch the ground and kissed both of them simultaneously. I walked across the parking lot with that respect in my heart. I jumped in my Eighteen-wheeler to hit the Arizona eighty five. I took north to Phoenix. The doubt of being cheated on grew with each gear I shifted up and shifted down. I took that doubt all the way to Buckeye City. The idea of seeing Odia being stolen from me cut my head from my shoulders. I wanted to be wrong, but my head was boiling with bad dreams. It started snowing by the time I reached the Hwy 10. I stopped and spent that night at Love’s truck stop.

In May 1997, six months down the road, the thing that was supposed to go wrong, that Qi predicted about, went eventually wrong. We caught Odia at a public park, in an unthinkable tangle of limbs with an old man. She was doing sex inside a red Nissan SUV. History is doomed to repeat itself to those who did not learn from it, as it was said, Odia Sico was doing it again. My own eyes saw the humiliating truth. This was not the first time she got caught cheating. She had been there many times over. One of these times was when she was doing it with Umba. Just like that day, she was caught in a dishonesty position with him and kicked out from Brazel Musamba, her then husband’s residence. For a while after that, she miserably lived on the streets of Lusaka, Zambia. She did not learn a thing or two from that lesson.

Like the day with Umba, Odia Sico denied her decadent infidelity right there on the spot as we all were watching her. She put up a big fight and explained things as why she was sitting on the top of that old man. She also refuted what the Tricksters was recording live. Just like many times before, she denied every single thing we saw. I left the Park. For a while I did not go back home. I stayed away from my own house because I was not sure I could control my insanity in her presence.

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

CC: [e-mail]

Subject: Re: Where are we going?

Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 10:01:42

Tonton Kas’

Do us all a favor. Give it up. For one, if anything have ever happened between you and my mom, whatever had happened, give it up. For two, now it is over and you need to get over it. For three, what you did in the park was kidnapping, my mother is in the hands of someone else. Therefore you need to stop stalking her. This man treats her with respect and has his life on track. You need to work on getting yours on track by taking care of all your kids. All six, not just a few of them. You are a grown up man. It is over and it is over. If my dad found out what you have done, what you did and have been doing with my mom, he will go crazy on you, so drop it while you can. Get back to God and stop the foolishness.

Kamina Musamba.

Since it was coming from a child I raised, this letter was every man nightmare. What was written in it hurt me more than its bad structure. Kamina Musamba was a lost cause teenager. Her own father left her behind in the city of Hurst. She was with Saana Musamba, her big sister when I picked her up from the streets.

I opened my door to both girls, loved them as if they were mine. I established them and made them stand as responsible young persons in my house. These things were not done without sacrifices. I disconnected my television cable to save money for their foods. I content myself with old shoes I had and I cancelled my out-goings for their clothing. I did what a parent would have done for his children. I did what any parent do for his girls in this circumstance. Despite my sacrifices, Kamina spent her spare time prostituting herself for drugs inside Hurst Park. I grounded her many times over, forcing her to stay home. My mission was to try to protect her against sexual infection diseases and alcohol consumption. I never gave up on her. I spent my quality time lifting her up. It was not easy, but it worked. I therefore saved her from streets abuses.

Her letter showed discourtesy and hostility. It was not just a misplacement in verbal language, it was her way of paying me back all the good things I have done for her. The language used in there was not a child language, it was not a simple salt that would melt and disappear. It was a gathering of selected daggers in my heart. Her letter made me feel like I wasted that time washing a dry head with the best of my soaps. Even if a child is a child, some stepchildren are headaches to their providers. They pay back greatness with rudeness and ingratitude. This was how an American lady justified herself to the media, while giving back the Russian boy she adopted. That was the feeling I had about Kamina. If she was still in my house, I would have given her back to the streets where I had found her. Because of children like her, number of good parents abandoned kids they fought for a lot and raised with love, kids they thought they knew. I was not wrong to raise her but she was, from this point, making a bad parent out of me. It was a shame she talked so low about my all six of them children that way. They were not simple people. She shouldn’t have classified them as beings living in a situation of inequality. I loved all of them without discrimination. With that kind of statement, she tried to take herself off the equation and that was a disgrace because she was one of them, she is one of them. At the time she and her sister arrived in my three bedrooms apartment, beside five of my own, I had already adopted four Spanish children. Those kids belonged to my Mexican neighbors. They were about to be taken away by cps because both their parents were doing brainless things. They were also dealing drugs. By the request of their mother, who was the last to be arrested, I had to temporarily take custody of them. That made a total of eleven kids. Later on, the family grew with the birth of Veydha. So I did not have six but twelve children.

Kamina was raised in body and spirit among twelve children, instead of dismissing my duty as a father, she could have testified in a better way than that. What she wrote was a lame insult, it was written out of meanness and malice. She was a legitimate African woman with free judgment who did not forget where she was coming from, but she chose to write that letter with her mother’s blessing. That was a stepchild-like. Loving her mother was not stalking her. It was what a man does. Calling her over the phone was not stalking her, it was simply seeking a way to reconnect the conversation we used to run between us before things started to go sour. I was not stalking her, I was connecting the talk we used to have. Her mother and I established a routine; we cared for each other, and that was what I was doing. And doing so, that action of caring for her led me to catching her doing sex with another man, in the park.

As a parent of so many, and by any standard and definition, my life was on tracks. With 12 kids, it was not easy but I proved it. I did not need more performances to demonstrate anything to Kamina. I handled everything head up and there was nothing wrong with the way I was challenged. If I did not raise them the best way possible and the only way I knew how, then I would have been ashamed of myself and I would have let Kamina judge me. On the merit of the fact that ‘a child can also play the drum to which an adult can dance’, critics are always welcome as Pa said to me once, but Kamina did not have the right whatsoever to be telling me what I should have done with my children. Furthermore, she did not have a say in what I was doing with her mother. Odia Sico put herself in a bad position that was a bother to me and that would be a shame for everyone, so I strongly did what I was supposed to do.

Kamina was raising her voice. With that kind of tone, she was not putting me in a position of me listening to her drum beat, if I could have, and be dancing to it. With a language like that, she was not tuning it the way possible. Not only its rhythm was not timed and her experience shy limited, nothing good would have come out of it. Her severe and low barking confirmed and substantiated without a doubt that her mother’s infidelity on me did not start the day before yesterday. Therefore, I decided to react the American way. I decided to put two vicious bullets in her mother’s backside for her disrespect, and four destructive bullets in the low stomach of the man called Mondt. That would certainly not bring back my respect, but it would make me feel good, I thought. And to finish Kamina Musamba up, I decided to publish her secrets on the Internet. I knew many and they were not pretty to hear. These were not solutions, they were retributions. I knew with the time that they will produce echoes of hate. I did not care about hate anymore, from where I was standing, hate was just another feeling.

I laid down and readjusted my wobbly legs on the couch. I started arguing with myself. My reasons wanted me to act on the heat of that moment, while her words were still burning in me. But my heart advised me to wait for my nerves to cool down. My brain yearned for a deep thinking, it wanted me to consider a way to show Kamina how silly and wacky a regular man would turn into when disrespected. With two large pillows put under my head, facing the entrance door, I slid my body all the way into sleeping position. There, I saw a human form slowly opening my front door. It was hard to see his facial future but he was a big stature person wearing a long cowboy-like vest. That vest made him look just the way a villain of the western movies would have definitely do. He gave me the impression of being very menacing when he slowly entered my apartment and passed by my two little girls. They were playing a Nintendo game on the computer. I forced myself to open my eyes, I barely could move. I was mobilized by a certain force. Nevertheless I noticed that everything on him was blurry, ghostly and was not a picture perfect of a human being but he was without doubt a man. His shadow was also confusing, which was tremendously frightening. With each step he took, my wooded floor cracked. I could hear him march. He definitely was imposingly heavy. I could smell the disgusting stench of his body and the repulsive and unpleasant odor of his breath, but I had a big problem moving the smallest muscle of my body. Defending myself against his bad intentions was futile. The man had some kind of power that was weighing my entire body down. I couldn’t even turn my eyes in their orbits, period. At same and exact moment, the total energy out of him was also putting pressure on my chest. I felt it badly. To seek attention, I screamed harder this time. My voice crashed. It sounded unpleasant because I was also short of breath. My shout resonated as if it was a rumbling echo. I tried so many times to make my little girls run for their lives. I screamed and screamed, louder everytime, nothing was coming out distinctively. I had a serious problemI couldn’t even open my mouth correctly. Since I couldn’t clear my throat, I began to be chocked by my own saliva.

The distance between the front door and the living room couch was only eighteen feet, but it was taking very long to this man in villain cape to reach me. The more I was fighting, the more I was losing my vegetable forces. Even if he did not touch me yet, he was hurting me. Maybe he wanted to let me know that, since he was controlling the situation, I had to feel the pain first. I was getting weaker and weaker by seconds.

He finally sat down on top of two pillows I was laying my head on. I felt his weight sinking the couch in. I heard thereafter the couch squeak. He was very near my head, ready to suffocate me. I felt the wind from his black cap touch my face, and once I felt the man I got frozen. He had a complete control of my body and mind by then, and because of that, I became lesser alerted. He had me, absolutely. I don’t like to be controlled. I did not like to be controlled that day either, but I did not give up. I forced myself not to be. I collected the rest of what remained in me, strained myself again and suddenly, I turned my head around. I moved and woke up. That was when I realized that thinking of Kamina Musamba’s letter; I passed out on the couch and had another nightmare, or a day mare for that matter. I was mad at myself as usual because of the noise I was making. I asked my two little girls why they did not wake me up; Veydha said that it was funny. Mumu said it was only about thirty seconds. They knew what to do when that condition happens. They have been told to wake me up every time they saw me fighting when asleep, but this time, they decided to laugh. That nightmare felt longer than thirty second. I lived hours of fear, moments of panic and jolting instants. I descended in hell. Thirty seconds of laugh for them was an eternity of anguish and torment for me. It was a real definition of calvary. I have been having that bad dream since I was twelve years old. The first time I had it perceptibly, I was with Commander Kalenga Kasongo, my brother. We were young and raising pigeons. They grew to be so many. We couldn’t eat or sell them as fast as they were getting hatched. Even though they had their own mud hut, they preferred the warmer roof of our twelve bedrooms house. Because of them, we had pigmy eagles and egg-eater snakes around the compound. These animals invaded our main residence. Mr. Kasongo Senga, my Pa, didn’t really worry about pigmy eagles; they were living outside. They flew in, caught a pigeon, and flew out. He was concerned mostly about snakes. Naturally born small, slender and green tree living, those animals moved in to live up in the roof.

To reduce the heat, The roof of our big house was made out of steel sheets on the top and tropical materials under. From bottom all the way to the top, the whole ceiling was built on layers of bamboo sticks on which were laying lot of brown stubbles. When these snakes moved in, they made the roof their prime residence. Just like a chameleon would have done it, they traded their olive green skin color to brown, to mingle in with the color of the house stubbles. They became plain brown. Some changed their green color to stripy brown, other to dotted brown. Commander Kalenga Kasongo said that they shaded into equatorial African snakes and adapted themselves to bodies that could help them move around, unnoticed inside these stubbles and straws. They did so to easily steal pigeon eggs, one at the time, and swallow them in the move. These snakes trashed the whole house with crushed shelves. We killed many and still did not get rid of them. They were able to have a clutch of hundred babies every three months. They kept appearing from nowhere, crawling on us when we went to bed. That was creepy. Pa decided to take the house roof down. Saturday was picked for the improvement. The whole village decided to help because the reconstruction needed to be finished the same day. They promised to bring straws, iron sheets, bricks, food and drinks, or anything that could help make both houses snake-proof. Ironically, it started to rain in that very morning. Everything got delayed. It was about four in the afternoon when the help finally dropped the main house roof down. We had to spend that night in a roofless house.

I did not want to use my room because I was scared. I went in the commander’s room. It was there where I saw for the first time a man coming from outside, crawling down like a gecko on the surface of the wall. He was coming to get me. I screamed, calling for my big brother. I told him that there was a man inside. He heard my voice and woke up. He got scared too. Where, where? he repeatedly asked me. I was looking at him but was not able to see its face. I couldn’t even move my finger to point it to him. This creature was still menacingly crawling down by planting his Freddy Kruger-like nails on the wall. The whole image of him and his clothes were baffling to me. It was as if he was moving the color of the night with him, the same way air moves inside a pile of fog. That scared me more. When Pa, who overheard me, started to knock on the bedroom door, the man begun crawling back up by appearing and disappearing like the little girl in the Ring movie. Pa said, Where is he? With a high-pitched voice, I said, He is there, on the wall. He is crossing over. He is on the top of the wall. My Pa looked everywhere and did not see a thing. It was a dream son, go back to sleep. He said.

That was when I realized that I was having not a very bad dream but a night from hell. That man I saw on roofless walls, in my Pa house, was the same man I have been seeing since. He had been in lots of my nightmares. It was the same man who broke in my apartment without breaking my front door when I was getting ready to react to Kamina’s letter. There are days when I feel his presence four times in one night.

I have received many explanations about this phenomenon and about why I never been able to move or to wake up. The best explanation came from sister Meüs, a catholic nun. She was my French teacher and professor at Bosembo College, in Congo Kinshasa. She said that that perceptive vision happens when a person is about to wake up, or in a process of falling to sleep. The man in your dream is not a man per ce, it is a sensitive discernment with acuity due most of the time to a lack of oxygen inside the brain. People do see strange things when they do not have enough oxygen in the brain. Your sleeping position is one to blame too, it recollects by reminiscence, and plays the same image over and over in your brain. Those who are depressed, and who do not exercise enough, do also experience this phenomenon when transitioning in different sleep stages. Not moving a muscle when trying to wake up is actually a protection mode to avoid being physical in response to that ‘dream’. It is normal to feel the unwieldiness of the body and its gravity on the bed at that moment because it is not a nightmare, even if it feels so. It is not even a dream; it is a semi consciousness of the body during which both, the normal muscles and the voluntary muscle, enter the body into a state of paralysis. These things happen to those experiencing trauma, and to those who take stimulant before going to sleep. You need to have a regular sleeping habit with a regular schedule. She said.

Since then, to avoid the dullness of the mind, I found it very important to always try to scream. It takes the heaviness in my head and wakes me up eventually. Once up, I always step outside and breathe a deep blast of fresh air. My grandpa had an explanation of his own. He said that is not a nightmare; it is a real thing. The person you see in your dream is the malign spirit that is sent in human body to twist your neck when you go to sleep. He will never do it. You are shield. Kiabu Senga, my little sister offered herself as a sacrifice. She died to protect the whole family. She had been a guard from over there, watching over every member of this family. She fights that damaging spirit for you and for every one of my children and my grandchildren.

This could have been true if I was still back home in Africa. According to the first law of witchcraft and to the sorcery beliefs, a hurtful spirit operates naked, in a human body. He has to follow established rules. One of these rules is to operate only after the twelfth gong of midnight. He has to mysteriously fly in to twist his victim’s neck and fly back to the den before the sunrise, and be in before the apparition of the first beam of the sun. One second more or a second after that, just like the way it would happen to Dracula, he will burst into flames of fire. To avoid been burned alive, the malign spirit of my grandpa would then land and hide. Landing in United States of America when you are a sorcerer is a bad business. There is not a place to hide for people like that. He would get caught, be exposed and brought to justice.

The second law of witchcraft and the sorcery beliefs is that the malign spirit cannot fly above a vast body of water. The ocean is one of them. I am thousands of miles away from the nearest coast, and for that reason only, it is impossible for any of these bad spirits to reach me in the United States. The time zone difference is also a big barrier for this kind of business. When it is midnight back home, the only time he can use to take off, it is eight in the morning in Hurst Texas. If he persists and decides to travel like normal living human being, come and wait here in the USA for the suitable time to do his harmful business nevertheless, and since he has to do it naked, he will be caught and locked in a mental institution. This country doesn’t believe in a human being flying not been in an apparatus or conducting any kind of business butt naked around their children. Since people do not sleep in this country, since they watch over each other, and with the above reasons in my mind, I concluded therefore that the visitor in my dreams was not spiritual. No sorcerer can torment me, physically or spiritually, here in this United States of America.

The impossible explanation I received about me dreaming and not being able to move while seeing a ghostly presence was from a coworker. She was hooked to science fiction, a lot. She said I have been a lucky guy all along. An extraterrestrial have been visiting me. That was why I could smell, hear, and see him without being able to move a muscle. I have to learn how to communicate with him instead of trying to wake up. I never believed her.

Chapter 3

THANK YOU KAMINA

In the backyard of the sanctuary I am coming from, there is the family at one side, the white man’s school in the middle and the village that occupied the front row. They all work together for the good of the emerging young blood. Each party has a specific job to do. Their common fight is to make the child come out strong to enter the world. The other job is to make that child understand that he or she belongs to the village. By using the remaining of the time, after a long day of work at the field, which is all the time he has in his hands, the village parent would withdraw a quality time from the spare time that the child has after school, to coach him or her about the life, the nature of things and the respect of elders. From a practical point of view, what he gives is always the instruction by initiation.

For all intents and purposes, the initiation is as important as the life itself. It is the moral fiber for the young person because of the inclusive personality it brings in. That moral fiber is not part of the growing young person’s life, it is a growing young person himself as whole. And the initiation is not different from the subject receiving it for the reason that it creates the youth in the young blood, it is that growing young blood himself. The work of the single parent or the initiator in my village is a full-time job and an around the clock effort for the good of the growing young man. It is completed by what is known today as the third help. This third help, called education by the white man, is nothing but the initiation brought in through buildings he calls school. The school is an important occupational instrument by its philosophy. It teaches the basics of the other way of life. From its roots and with its ethics, it is as important as what is the village, and its job is not less or more than the village parent’s job. The morality coming out from the school is the same compared to the elder initiation, with just a banal difference; the school trains how to write and how to read. Both the school and the village initiation converge for the edification of the youngster. They teach the young person the rule of things and the respect of nature. We found the respect of elders in both, the white man’s school and the middle of the village as intended by the family at once.

Kamina did attend all three; the family edification and system, the village initiation and tutoring, and the white man school of education and learning. She did get all lessons, understood them perfectly and graduated from each one of them. She understood that after the duty of the family, the white man’s school