And so there you are, bemoaning your lot for having so many relatives and being the only one in the family who have the capability to accommodate your kin. You are in a house that you are not entitled to occupy, which means you may be thrown out any time! The house was expropriated from an absentee owner, and you only rely on the hope that the fellow will not dare come back! However, even the hardcore génocidaires have known that there is no evidence to implicate them, since they killed everybody who could have been an eyewitness, and are coming back in droves. Still, whoever comes to Kigali ‘City’, and is remotely related to you, will bring kith and kin to stay at their son’s house. They may be from the village here in the country or from outside Rwanda. You are now mourning because you do not see how you will support a whole clan. If you knew how many living things you were already supporting, however, and how many extra mouths your kin are bringing along, you would sit down and laugh your baldhead off, because your estimate of the clan is the biggest understatement of the century!
Alternatively, if you are the mean type and pride yourself in being an expert at keeping the hangers-on at bay, you will appreciate the futility of your effort. You think you are tough because you are able to ask these fellows who they are and what they want. You reach home and find a new face that was able to go past the domestic help, you-don’t-know how. Out of earshot of the offending guest, you harangue your domestic worker for admitting a stranger into the house. The hapless fellow pleads with you; he verified that the guest was truly a relative. When the guest explains to you, you are able to say: “No, it is not true that I had a grand-mother who had an uncle living in Congo, then the uncle had a nephew in Kenya, who married a Ugandan and which Ugandan mother is your aunt!” You may be tough but, unfortunately for you, hangers-on are a dime a dozen.
For instance, you are able to sit and order one bottle of beer for yourself, ignoring this resourceful character next to you, who is telling you joke after joke, and laughing for you in case you are too tired to do it yourself. He has already invaded you at the counter, where you thought you would take refuge, and your effort at showing him that you are totally absorbed by the picture behind the bartender go unheeded. You excuse yourself and go to the washroom, hoping that the fellow will have hooked somebody else. When you come back, you are greeted by the bore’s ear-to-ear grin! How unfortunate can one be!
If you knew how many creatures are literally hanging on you for their livelihood, you would creep out of your skin and leave it to them as their meal! Stretched out, your whole skin is generally about 1.7-sq. metres, which makes it a big hunting ground. If you are really mean and you scrub and rub your skin every other second, then your skin may be host to only 292,778,359 bacteria at any one moment! This is exactly the population of the USA at this very minute, as I write this. (Yes, the Americans are so advanced that they know they will have a birth in 7 seconds, a death in 12, an international migrant in 21, a citizen returning from abroad in 4,573 seconds, etc. Of course, if we were to be organised here in Rwanda, only one computer would be enough to hold similar statistics for our tiny population of 8 million.)
Anyway, your skin! It is a big national park, habitat to game as varied as fungi and bacteria, not counting the long list of occasional visitors who may drop in for a meal and a drink! These include mites, ticks, leeches, lice, botflies, black flies, bedbugs, kissing bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, etc. Your skin is thus literally crawling with creatures jostling for a drink of your generous blood. Whatever measures you take, at least the inevitably permanent lodgers will be there to partake of your hospitality! No amount of tough talk, domestic workers, kadogos, bouncers or scrubbing and rubbing will keep them away. Of course, some of these creatures have succumbed to the sophisticated weaponry of man, like insecticide, and are unable to get access to some malicious humans. Many, however, are still triumphant!
If you think I am talking hogwash, then approach a microscope, get something to scrape your forehead and put the resultant powder on a glass slide, under a magnifying glass. The sight will make your hair stand on end (if it can!), uncovering more mites that will be calmly grazing on your head! On the glass below, you will espy adult mites lying criss-cross like sticks of wood, their stumpy little legs wriggling and twitching as if they are dreaming. They have tiny claws to help them cling onto your skin, and needle-like mouthparts for consuming skin cells. The whole family is there, so you will see children with angled-back scutes on their underbellies, like fish scales, which help them to anchor themselves in your skin. The eggs are shaped like arrowheads and have glue that enables them to stick onto your skin. As for inside you, it is a quarry where bacteria and viruses, together with bigger parasites like worms, are busy digging up chunks of your flesh harder than good old Nelson Mandela on Robben Island!
The human race is definitely under assault. Maybe you have heard of these plants, in South America, that cherish human flesh. If you have not, why don’t you venture down there and see for yourself? Imagine all the cabbage that has vanished down your throat: suppose it were to revenge! That is nothing, however, if you’ve heard the story of this German gentleman, who got a brilliant idea when he felt a pang of hunger. Herr Armin Meiwes advertised on Internet for “young, well-built men aged between 18 and 30” who wanted to be eaten! He got five eager responses within a few minutes! Unfortunately for the candidates, the man was choosy about who would grace his dinner platter: the first applicant, a cook, was too fat, the second, a teacher, was too lanky, the third, a hotel worker, too short and the fourth, a pensioner, too old. The lucky applicant was 43-year old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, a man of good build who looked younger than his age. Brandes was overjoyed for not only being accepted as food but also for being granted his wish of sharing the delicacy of his own fried and flambéed manhood with Meiwes.
And you thought you were generous!
