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Lying there on the shrink’s comfy sofa, I could feel my mind drift into a memory that felt so real. This was my favorite childhood memory, and it happened to be the day I almost died.
What makes this memory special is the context around the situation.
My mother had just recently separated from her lover and officially entered single motherhood. The best she could afford at the time was to move next to one of the biggest slums in Africa, Mathare.
I must have been about ten and what I called home at that time was a single room barely five by three meters. This room was squeezed on the far end of the ground floor and placed squarely next to the washrooms. They were actually latrines judging from the filth covering the walls. There were two latrines, but one had overflowed. Anyone desperate to help themselves would have to negotiate their way to the pit by stepping onto strategically placed building stones.
The toilet was threatening to overflow, and whenever it rained, nobody would even access the facilities for a handful of days. The apartment looked like it had been engineered by algae and mold. You could actually scrape moss from the walls.
The one bulb hanging dead center in our room was always on 365 days a year. The only natural light came from the flat’s tiny rust-infested main…
