Contest Alert ⚠️ 1 Picture 1 Story Week #93

A Day in Mama Nkechi’s Market Corner

Here was a blazing Monday afternoon and the sun was shining in a warm way upon the little patch of the busy neighboring market possessed by Mama Nkechi. She was already selling grain and cooking items more than fifteen years and every day she saw new people as well as had an opportunity to hear old tales. Her corner was unsophisticated, and it consisted of: a plate of rice, rice beam, groundnuts, ogbono and other local farm produce spread on large nylon sheets. The bottles of palm-oil were brought up very proudly among the piles of beans, and glittered in the sun like so many hoarded bottles of treasure.

She was sitting in a yellow rain umbrella which was worn (to shreds) and her legs were holding together with a comfortable position as one who had sorted beans about a thousand times. The market was alive around her: women haggling, children on errands and traders calling back and forth to their customers. Above her dangled amusing assortment of garments -- sport incarnations, shirts, and dresses, in the air a little in the breeze.

A little boy Chinedu walked over with a crumpled up note of 500 nairas in his hands. And his mother sent him to buy one mudu which is a bowl of beans. with a smile of affection and mama Nkechi turned to him. How is your mama? said she. Yeh, she at home, he answered bashfully. She measured the beans with decency, knotted it up in a black nylon sack and even threw an extra bit here and there. then said she to tell her I greeted her well.

Lower in the row traders were laughing away under their umbrellas and having a joke at the expense of a customer who attempted to mark up rice as being garri. And dried fish and dust and hot sun, the smell of home, of survival, and community filled the air.

It was not only a market where people were trading goods. It was the assembly of lives, minor pleasures and true subsistence. What Mama Nkechi had in mind was that every piece of rice or spoonful of oil she sold meant a brick in the house of her dreams a better future of her grandchildren.

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