Jumping to Attention II

First off, I would like to thank my friends and (in advance) those of you who will hopefully join our bandwagon, for the outpouring of love and encouragement you guys showed me on my first post on this page! Suffice to say that I am indebted to you all for encouraging a lazy writer like me to becoming better ):

On a not-so-lighter mode, I want to share with us how important it is to be sensitive and attentive to our environment. I hopped a taxi on my way to work a few days ago around 8:10 am. Once in the taxi, I immediately told the driver that it was too hot inside the taxi, and asked him for the window winder (of course most winding levers in taxis and buses in Nigeria are always either not available or the only available on is kept with the driver). He ignored me at first, until I asked him to wind down the window for me instead. To this he replied with a sharp: "It's missing." Right then, I felt queasy and asked that he stopped moving the taxi. Next thing he went off the road to the shoulder/ curb (as we call it here in Nigeria), and the taxi came to a halt.

A drama of sort then followed at the end of which I could not but thank God for delivering me from what I would call ‘a lion's den,' although I am aware that some persons may term it melodramatic by me: In the bid to open the door, the other passenger (a middle aged man with a badly shrunken right arm which I didn't initially notice) moved over to my side in a split second, and tried to ‘help' open the door. In his other hand he had a N100 note. Then, stretching across my ‘frontal' or ‘oranges' as some of you would term those beautiful things that tend to cling unto a male-hugger (laughs), I felt his left hand go straight into my ginormous handbag that was securely hung over my left shoulder.

In horror I started to scream in Yoruba (much of which was in unprintables). I remember yelling: "let me out of this car, please" As God would have it, I saw two guys whom I measured to be in their early 20s, coming towards the car. They seemed so close to car's lights yet they couldn't even hear me. They were obviously too engrossed in their discussion to hear me scream. As they came closer to the back door where I sat, I yelled harder in plea and thankfully, they obliged and opened the door from the outside and I promptly jumped out.

It is interesting to note that the car in question being a ‘manual' car shouldn't have required a great deal of effort to open during those three dramatic minutes I was holed up in there. And now, in retrospect, there are a few questions I am still unable to find answers to even as I write this. What, for instance stopped the car's door from opening? We are talking here about a car that did not at all seem ‘rickety' unlike the other junks one gets to see on our roads all the time. This particular auto seemed to be in just the sort of physical state you would expect any decent car to be in. Moreover, the opening handle on the inside seemed fine. What would have happened if I wasn't paying attention or was busy chatting away on my phone? What if I had not sought for help from those guys? Would I have been hypnotised or placed under some sort of spell such that I wouldn't be able to speak until they were done stealing all they could from me or even worse?

Ultimately, friends I would like for us to ALWAYS be on guard. Vigilance should be your priority wherever you find yourself - in public or private surroundings. Truth is, evil lurks around even in small, seemingly innocuous settings. We should, therefore, always be present-minded enough such that potential threats to our safety could jump to our attention.

Cheers.