There comes a time you learn to just watch people and not react to many things. You just keep doing you. There are roads to be travelled and mountains to be crossed and plenty of obstacles to be bypassed and ignored.

Seated in my office a few minutes to lunch break, my eyes were fixed on the office door. I wasn’t looking at the sugar plantation below, nor the motivational quotes above the exit of the office. All I saw in those seemingly endless minutes were mistakes upon mistakes.

Mistakes that went beyond my current workplace. But instead of hating myself for making them, I have come to realize that real opportunities always lay ahead and missed opportunities are training grounds for the real show.

Learning from my mistakes is the only way to maximize future opportunities and without mistakes, an opportunity’s chances of being maximized are slim.

My temperature was high, my palms were sweaty and I felt slightly dizzy with headache. It’s a normal abnormality. It’s the signal that I haven’t eaten since morning.

As I was about to step out for lunch break, a client walked in. I hate being interrupted on my way to food. We sit so I could hear him out. I realized I am wilder and tougher than usual when I am hungry. I ask the client very direct questions and I never smile when the client does. The meeting ended earlier than usual and I finally step out to a nearby coffee shop.

It was an African coffee shop. A wooden kiosk with long benches around the kiosk, except at the entrance and its yard where two large bowls stood for washing and rinsing coffee cups. A large polythene bag stuffed with leftover sandwiches and tea bags stood some distance from the two bowls.

Diallo, the man who operated the kiosk, is on his feet as usual preparing a customer’s noodles, and all around him were impatient men waiting for either their coffee or noodles to be served. It was a coffee kiosk but noodles was sold here too.

Most of Diallo’s customers were men and whenever a lady passed by, all they did was gossip about her. One fair lady with a fine body shape was passing.

“She!” Diallo indicated.

“This one?” One customer asked, even though the answer was obvious.

“Yes,” Diallo emphasized and added, “She…she doesn’t mind. She isn’t difficult. See that container over there? She’s coming from there. It’s like that every afternoon.”

The men smile. A customer arrives and a fight seemed to burst out between the newly arrived customer and an old one. Diallo threatened to chop off the head of the new customer with a knife he was using to chop his onions. He hurls insults at the new customer and many of the men at the kiosk do same.

But this was no fight. It was how men welcomed a true friend here. This coffee kiosk was family. Diallo was from Burkina Faso, the new customer was from Mali. The old man beside me is from Mauritania and the rest of the men were from Ivory Coast. It was easy to tell the nationalities because at Diallo’s coffee kiosk, an insult is directed every now and then to a particular nationality and its bearers soon came to its defence.

It was much easier to recognize nationalities when the national teams of Diallo’s customers played a match, when everyone flocked around Diallo’s little tv to tell them all about how their country came close to taking a world cup and a racist referee stood in the goalposts. Diallo’s customers can see in that little tv how angry supporters are going to burn down a head coach’s house for losing a match.

A tall, beautiful lady came to deliver bread to Diallo. She was fair but owed a large part of her fair complexion to bleaching creams.

As she left, Diallo said in a low tone, “One day I went to her house to collect some money she owed me some time ago and while waiting for her in her living room, she came out from the bathroom with just her towel about her waist. And the towel fell. She stood there looking at me. I couldn’t resist. After, she told me how her husband worked on a ship and could be away for months and it was very difficult sometimes waiting and burning.

After that incident, I never wanted to do it again. But she kept calling. She wants it again. I said to myself, see this woman ooo. She want to put me in trouble.”

As I listened to them, I was quite surprised at the way they shared their secrets without any fear or shyness. Diallo’s wife worked there early mornings and Diallo took over in the afternoons when he was done with his deliveries.

I wondered what she would do if she found out all that her husband was saying. But I know Lokko Town well enough to know what will actually happen. They will fight, she will insult and beat him but they will still be together. If you saw Diallo and his wife eating and teasing each other at the kiosk, you would think they never fight.

But like Diallo always told me, the fact that you fight or have had heartbreaks in the past is no reason to never want to be with a woman. You fight, you make up. It is all these that make up life and marriage.

The coffee shop is a break from Mrs. Stella and all the drama at my workplace.

Unfortunately, I have finished my lunch of coffee and I must return to the office…