Beloved grandma killed in a storm

LIFESTYLE

Excerpts of a biography of Jimi MP Wake Goi

By PAUL MINGA
WITHIN the first few weeks of high school, Wake felt homesick when he thought of his beloved home – the surplus garden food, his best buddies from community school days and his beloved dad.
But as time went by, he began to forget all those things and set his attention on schoolwork and studies. As a boy from a rural village, he found interesting structures and items around the school grounds and inside the school buildings; they were strange yet fascinating.
He soon became familiar things as he settled in for the first term of the school year.
In term 2, of seventh grade, an incident happened which disrupted his positive progress thus far. During an agriculture period, Wake felt the urge to relieve his bladder so he quickly made his way into the school’s coffee garden nearby to do his business. But, while he was there to urinate, he felt like defecating as well so he decided to do both.
As soon as he was done and walked out the coffee garden, a senior student from Chimbu came along and confronted Wake, impersonating a security guard. Wake could still remember that the senior student took hold of his hands and said: ‘Boy, you have committed a very serious crime, so you will be fined accordingly for disposing your waste in the school coffee garden.
“If you don’t pay up any cash as a fine, I’ll report your action to the school administration and you will be expelled from school.”
When the cunning student said this, Wake was shaken with fear. He knew he was in a serious trouble and had to act to save himself from being expelled from school. He then quickly rushed to the coffee garden and removed his waste with the aid of plant leaves and dumped in the nearby bush.
But that didn’t impress the older student. He still persisted in demanding Wake to pay him a fine. When the senior student insisted, poor Wake was troubled and freaked out. He thought that he was in serious trouble. He knew he would be expelled if he didn’t pay the fine as demanded by the senior student. He did not know though that the senior student was just playing a clever trick on him to gain something from him.
Out of fear, Wake promised to pay the fine and ran to his dormitory and took out all his savings, what his poor dad had given him for his basic needs. He quickly returned with everything that he had and handed it to the senior student. As soon as the dishonest student got what he wanted from Wake, he told him that his charge was dropped.
He advised Wake that he would not be reporting his action to the school administration. It was a sad situation. Poor Wake, what he had budgeted to last him for the whole of term 2 was all given away.
The last K30 that he preserved to use little by little for soap, pens and other things was all given away to the cunning student. That particular incident taught Wake something about school and life: There were always bullies about who made it their habit to gain from the naivety of innocent young schoolboys and girls.

Terrible incident
Wake’s mother, Ngimbil passed away a few weeks after they got the news of her son qualifying for high school. That was during the Christmas period in 1980. Ngimbil’s passing left a huge gap in Goi’s family, and there were the numerous tasks that were best done by a mother. So after Ngimbil’s burial and customary practices were observed and settled, her mother decided to step in to play the role of a mother for the Goi family, in providing garden food for Goi and the kids. She also made time available to cook meals for Goi and the kids, whenever she could do so.
Though she was old, she knew that her grandchildren needed someone to provide them with motherly comfort and care and to prepare meals for them and doing various other things for them.
Though Wake’s grandma had her own children and other things to attend to, she made time available to cook or care for Wake’s younger siblings. She was generous in doing motherly tasks for Goi and the kids. Wake as one who was already in high school didn’t need much attention from his father or grandma. But his younger siblings needed that attention. Whenever she called in for a visit to Goi’s family home, she would say: ‘Ngimbil has gone but I am around for us to get along for as long as we want to.’
Grandma’s regular visits and kind assistance was immeasurable and greatly appreciated by Wake and his siblings.
When Wake returned home from school holidays, he would pay a visit to their grandma’s home, which wasn’t far from theirs. The matriarch appreciated Wake’s visits. She often placed aside a small fraction of her income from the sale of garden produce to give to Wake whenever he came home for holidays.
Since Wake and his other siblings had lost their mum, they looked up to grandma as their source of support, care, food and other good things.
One day, the grandma, as she always did, made her way to one of her gardens. The dawn of the day looked fine and promising. She took her garden tools and left. As she usually did, she planned to complete some tasks in the morning part of the day. After that she would gather the harvest for the evening meal. When she arrived in the garden, she spent time cleaning and weeding the garden in the morning. It was around 3 or 4 pm that she proceeded with the harvest. She planned to harvest more than enough so she could cook some for the evening meal and preserve some to sell the next day.
As grandma was busy with the harvest, the sky overhead gradually turned dull with signs of bad weather approaching. Not long after there were flashes of lightning with rolls of thunders. The thick clouds overhead soon covered the sky.
It was not long before a storm began with rain droplets and gusting winds. The grandma was not too worried by bad weather as she moved uphill from the bottom of her large garden. She did not think anything bad would happen.
However, as the storm raged, the gust of strong winds showed no mercy blowing off branches and causing tall trees to bend. Some were uprooted.
The poor grandma who was still busy with the harvest downhill in her garden in the midst of a storm when disaster struck. She didn’t realise that a huge boulder that was trapped by the roots of a dead tree up on the hill in her garden had slipped off its position and rolled downhill after the strong wind uprooted the tree. The boulder which sped down hill in full flight, hitting the old woman with such a mighty force that that it crushed her body into fragments.
The elderly woman was killed instantly. When she did not arrive home as expected, some family members rushed to her garden and were shocked to see the gruesome sight before them. It was unusual and shocking. They then quickly brought home the news of the grandma’s terrible death.
When the news reached Goi, he with the help of other men from the village took bags and rushed to the garden where they retrieved all of the grandma’s body parts and brought them home and had them buried.
Wake was told of this terrible and unpleasant news, and it was heartbreaking for him. His beloved grandma lost her life in a most cruel and terrible manner.
To Wake, who had lost his own mother a few years ago, it was another shock. He still remembers skipping class for a whole day to remember and mourn his loss.