@Akel_Love
At the tender age of 5, my mom, my dad and I moved to Ethiopia. Back then, Ethiopia was a veritable mass of boredom, considering the fact that I did not speak the language and there was simply nowhere to go. There were no cinemas, there were no malls…2 or three fancy restaurants, the Kenyan Embassy to boogie on Saturday nights (and hog mutura) and my friends’ houses were the sum of my social circle. There was…nowhere to go. There wasn’t even any telly. All the programming was in the main Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Tigrinya, Orominya, etc). The first and only time I ever watched Anastasia, it was in Amharic. My 6 siblings stayed in Kenya because they were so much older than I. I was doomed to a life of solitude.
School was fine, but then I would come back home and…eat, then do nothing. I wasn’t really friends with the neighbours, who could honestly only take up so much of my time. And, no tv. So I began to read.
I read, in a word, voraciously. I remember forcing away my headaches that would come from reading on the school van home. I read anything and everything; labels on breakfast cereals, my dad’s papers on Lipids, his company policies, names on buildings and maps, even the Amharic I didn’t understand. My dad noticed that I had gone through all the books in the house. This was not a good thing, because he had to buy more. Even worse was that all the books in the house belonged to my older siblings, which meant at the age of 7, my favorite authors were Sidney Sheldon and Ken Follet. I didn’t tell him this as he continued to buy me Nancy Drews and Sweet Valleys.
I used to read 3 books a day, and sometimes a magazine from the school library. My dreams became to become an editor for or work for a children’s magazine like Cricket. I was way ahead of anyone in my class in all things written, be it spelling bees, compositions, analytical exercises, you name it. I knew things I really didn’t need to know, random facts that were fun to spew off every so often to shock an audience. My siblings remember me reciting the periodic table to them at the age of 9. Clearly I liked Chemistry a lot more than I do now!
I read because I was forced to. I had no choice. My brain was becoming a vegetable. Not that I minded. I continue to read because I fell in deep, unadulterated, timeless, passionate love with the written word. Words are now my life. I am so glad that my childhood turned out to be what it was, because without it, this amazing (J) writer today may never have been.
See more of Abigail Arunga at www.theShyNarcissist.blogspot.com and www.allwoman.co.ke.
