As the rains begin

“See, this is the way the global media works,” I rant. “A bomb goes off in Boston, three people are killed, and it gets three weeks of coverage on CNN. In Baga over 185 are killed, and what? Is it on CNN?” I wave my Sunday Trust, with the headline that screams, “I Counted 228 […]

“See, this is the way the global media works,” I rant. “A bomb goes off in Boston, three people are killed, and it gets three weeks of coverage on CNN. In Baga over 185 are killed, and what? Is it on CNN?” I wave my Sunday Trust, with the headline that screams, “I Counted 228 Graves, 4,000 Destroyed Houses –Sen. Maina.”
I feel a sudden wave of guilt. “Even I didn’t even write about Baga this week,” I admit. I had a busy week. I could hardly process the numbers coming out of Baga. I slotted in an interview with an American librarian I had been wanting to run. A week earlier, I had published a guest column by Egyptian writer and journalist Nadia El-Awady. She wrote of the irony of her shock over the Boston marathon bomb when her “reaction towards the deaths of people in my own country and those happening in neighboring countries has been one of numbness.”
It is a numbness and exhaustion I think we all face. The numbers are hard to grasp. Global television networks are glutted with images from Boston, interviews with eyewitnesses, blogged reminiscences of those who knew the Tsarnaev family. There is an overabundance of information in America. By contrast, the military has given journalists little access to Baga, and the town has been without telephone communication since Boko Haram destroyed communications masts. It is telling that the most damning evidence of the violence comes from satellite images miles above the earth, rather than the close-up intimate stories that make viewers feel a personal proximity to Boston. By Wednesday, Human Rights Watch undermines the military’s claim that only about thirty houses had caught fire with satellite images, which show that around 2,275 buildings had been destroyed in the violence.
Guilty that I had not written about Baga the week after the news came out, I obsess over it for the rest of the week. Monday, I read of another gun battle in Bama town of Borno State, which killed 17 others and destroyed hundreds of other homes and businesses. This is the war zone that the north-east has become while the world and most of Nigeria looks the other way.
Monday morning, a friend comes by to work on a broken lock. “Were you in church on Sunday?” he asks, knowing I often go to an EYN church (Ekklesiyar Yan Uwa Nigeria—Church of the Brethren). I had visited another church that Sunday, but I am worried by the look on his face. “Did something happen?” I ask.
“Something terrible happened,” he tells me. A bus full of women returning to Jos from an EYN women’s retreat in Adamawa state crashed in Bauchi state on Saturday evening. Three pastors’ wives were killed. Among them was Christiana Nshem, wife of the pastor of EYN Headquarters church in Jos that I often attend. She and her husband had given me a ride to church on several occasions. She had the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. 
The death of these women is yet another blow to the peace-loving EYN Church, which has been hit hard in the past few years.  A February 2013 report on the Church of the Brethren website shows that since 2009 over 14 EYN churches have been burnt, and over 147 members killed, including three pastors. There have been more attacks in March and April since this report was compiled.
This time, though, women were not shot or caught in an explosion—but lost to the “hungry road.” Even in the age of Boko Haram, road accidents remain one of the highest killers in Nigeria.
Monday afternoon, I go with a friend to the pastor’s house where tents have been set up outside and church members file in and out of the humble house to sit for a while, gazing through tears at the family photos lined up along the floor. When I write in the book set up in front of Mrs. Nshem’s photo, I search the eyes in the image for that smile that I can still see so vividly in my memory. We bid goodbye to the pastor, who sits alone under one of the tents. His eyes are hollow with grief, but he kindly thanks us.
I find it hard to concentrate for the rest of the day. I think of the article I wrote a month earlier about the longsuffering biblical character Job. In that article I had mentioned the attack on an EYN church in Gav, in which a pastor’s son had been killed. I had gone to Pastor Nshem to confirm the story. Now, his wife is gone.
I think of other stories I have heard. People who outwardly seem so happy and successful confide in me their suffering, the debilitating pain of depression, the casual cruelty of salary-withholding bosses, the betrayal of spouses. I write to a group of my old school friends, “Sometimes, these tragedies are almost too much to bear. There are just too many, too close together. Wallahi, people suffer in this world.” I think of my old schoolmate Rachel, a brilliant and adventuresome young woman who finished her PhD in 2011 and died last month at age 33 when she was electrocuted by an ungrounded electrical cord; I think of the recently widowed woman, sister of a friend, who died in childbirth leaving four children behind; of the university student drowned crossing a river; of the hundreds of people lost every week to violence in the north. At the market where I buy vegetables, one of the vendors tells me he had relatives in Baga. “My uncle was killed,” he says.
Now that the rains have begun, the first green of new grass pushes up through the ground, bushes burst into flower, avocados hang low on trees, and the perfume of waxy orange blossoms fills the air. 
On Saturday, my family attends a baby naming ceremony at the house of a family friend, Martha. Her husband, Sani, was tall and handsome, a strong outgoing man who owned a metals business. Last year they moved into the spacious new house he built for their family of four growing children, three daughters and one son. In September, he had a stroke. He lay unconscious in the hospital for a week, and then he died. Martha was three months pregnant with their fifth child.
This Saturday, the parlour is full with the same aunties and uncles and friends who had come to condole Martha and her children seven months earlier. Now they pass the baby around. It is a boy. His grandmother smiles down at him. He wakes up every now and again to take in his new world with wide eyes.
The pastor who had preached Sani’s funeral stands in front of Sani’s photo with the baby in his arms. He prays over him and then he smiles, “You know,” he says, “when a boy comes after the father dies, we say, the father has come back.” The little boy, Yakaide, looks up at him, his eyes big.
Outside, the clouds pile up black in the sky. The wind whips young girls’ skirts around their legs and sends stray leda bags scudding along the ground. Not long after, the rain comes. It beats down on the branches of trees, littering the ground with flowers. And then it seeps down into the earth to the seeds that lie waiting for life.