He’s lived in Nigeria. The source of many of the scary stories he told us. I’ve always wondered what took him there.
He’s never told us where he was from and why he had come to this remote part of the country. All we knew was that he was our class teacher, very dedicated, and lenient towards us.
Whenever he arrived from visiting his family far away, he looked different. He dressed decently and looked responsible. But the days that follow, he came to school in simple clothes that made one easily mistake him for a pauper. What his motivations were, we knew not.
Only that in hindsight, he now seemed an enigma that could only be partly solved by piecing together fragments of stories he told in class to illustrate a point, mostly stories about the doom in evil and the rewards of obedience and being morally upright.
He told us one day that he was once a mine worker. His work must have made him very rich because he showed us pictures of himself standing in slow while on a visit to Canada. He must have lived there for some time.
His stories of how many mine workers tried to steal gold out of their workplace suggest he was aware of alternatives to duping his superiors, must have participated in some of them, or knew others who did.
He told us they relieved him of his duties due to illness. High blood pressure and diabetes that was beyond normal. Seems he saw it coming but didn’t heed the warnings. For he himself admitted that his relatives cautioned him to cut his consumption of sugar, alcohol and fatty foods so that he doesn’t end up like his mother, who was no more.
Jobless and battling with hypertension and diabetes, and now struggling to shoulder so many family responsibilities that were fast outgrowing his savings, he runs to the far away north, where no one knew him. Where he could hide and perhaps start from scratch with old, worn out tools.
But the trauma of his loss was too much to bear. And behind the smiles our little faces saw and adored, was a gloomy man sick of the turn of events that landed him in this stable. He tried to gulp it all down with alcohol. But his tangible sorrows wouldn’t dissolve.
He advised us to never smoke, to be mindful of our consumption of fat and sugar. But one little girl in our class later told me how our class teacher spends his leisure time in a bar beside their house, drinking to drown his troubles.
Whatever was eating him was desperate to chew every piece of his sanity till he turned the wretch he now believed he was becoming.
We only know that they found him dead in his room after many days of not setting eyes on him, when the stench climbed the silent walls of his room, stood outside and bid the neighbors to come see what remained of a man who could take it no longer, of what remained of our beloved teacher who made such a powerful impact on our young minds.
Diary of a Wanderer 
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