It was one of those nights. He had just come back to his room from a rough day. For the most part, he’d thought of what he was about to do. He opened the folder where he kept his important papers. They were few. The one he sought was just there on top of everything else in the folder. He sat down on the mattress on the floor and just stared at the paper allowing his mind to wander. Absent to everything around. He shook his head intermittently. As though there were mosquitoes buzzing about his head. But, even if there were, he mightn’t have known. He was now outside that frame of consciousness.
It was his sister that woke him up this morning with a phone call. Knowing her penchant for the dramatic and having lost count of the number of times she’d called him up for the most mundane affairs, it took only one glance and a vexed sigh for him to hit the button that silenced the ringtone. It was just 4 am for all that was holy. Sleepy-eyed, he waited for the buzzer to end. He then switched the phone to “silent mode”, tossed about the bed to the other side that was colder and engaged his gears to “re-establish sleep mode”.
There were 35 calls and 13 text messages waiting for him when he roused himself from sleep to prepare for the day. Alarm bells went off everywhere in his head. Could something untoward have happened? He jumped from the bed. The fingers that struggled to open his phone’s call log were nervy. What ordinarily took him less than 4 seconds lasted about a minute. Most of the calls were from his sister as he feared. Then, he saw his mum had tried to reach him and two of his neighbours. He glanced around his room, ran outside, looking in both directions. Nothing seemed amiss. He dialled his mum. Just as the call began connecting, he remembered the text messages and quickly cut it.
He was vexed when he found out what the brouhaha was all about. SALT. Salt? Now, why should anyone think that this was going to be so important as to be so intent on reaching him before 5 am? His sister, mum, two friends and 3 others whose numbers were not saved on his phone all sent him messages similar only in the advice they gave the recipient. He or she were to bathe in warm water flavoured with salt to prevent the “bather” from the Ebola Virus Disease. It was also suggested that the recipient ingested some of the salt as well and for extra precaution, to rub it all over the body. How extreme! As he went inside the house to dress up for the day, he shook his head aggressively. What utter rubbish.
From the little he’d heard of the virus, they day before, it was not possible that salt could help much. He was eavesdropping the conversation of two passengers that boarded his bus. They seemed quite knowledgeable and everything they said about the virus was confirmed by the report he’d listened to on the radio just before he left the motor park for home. The medical professionals interviewed on radio had said they were working in concert with scientists at home and abroad to get any medication that will help those infected and save their lives. If the cure and preventive medicine was common salt, wouldn’t they have found out since? Now, these oversabi people were forming. He wasn’t even going to reply any of them.
He bathed as normal. In another quarter of an hour, his day was running in full swing. He’d located his driver for the day, agreed on the “commission” and was calling out for passengers when his discussion with a fellow conductor veered into Ebola and salt. That was when he realised his was not a special case. All passengers to a man had been given the suggestion by calls or texts, often from parents and relatives, quite early in the morning so that not a few complied before leaving the house. He watched in shock as people he considered more lettered than himself and who ought to have been better informed as to be able to separate fact from fiction admitted to having followed the advice to the letter. Their excuse? Better comply than be sorry. He couldn’t believe it. He voiced his objection. But the overwhelming support of the salty therapy and the already mounting medical dexterity with which some were already professing its efficacy shut him up.
Bus-load after bus-load, the subject of discussion did not swerve too far from Ebola Salts. Nor did his consternation drop at the vacuity of those who should have known better. These so called literates were just blockheads, he concluded. Was this what education did to people? Was it not supposed to empower you to use your head? To put two and two together and know when it is four, when it is twenty-two and when it is just two in one place and two in another? What was then the purpose of all their schooling? The certificate they tended everywhere? The suits they wore to make them look more than they actually were? Nothing. Empty heads everywhere. He was so engrossed in this thought process, he missed several bus stops, mixed people’s “change” up, and forgot to take money from at least two passengers, one of whom was honest enough to remind him.
He couldn’t even eat though he knew how famished he was. That was only worsened by the news that filtered into the park just before he left for his room. Two people had died from adhering too strictly to the salt therapy. Why not? He couldn’t explain how it’d caused their deaths but he reasoned that their sudden death was only a reprieve to their gullibility. They deserved to have been made to suffer some more, for their eyes to be cleared of their stupidity before they slowly die. He felt no sympathy for them. The last he heard before making his way home was that someone somewhere had apologised for the salt inducements, calling it a prank. He used the opportunity of the distance home to call his mum and sister, both of whom were educated, to never ever bother him with such things again after he’d told them of the deaths and prank. But they had heard already and were repentant.
He looked at the paper in his hand again and tore it to shreds. Then, he burnt the shreds. He’d continue with his “conductor” job, and when he’d save enough money, he’d buy a bus of his own. From that point, God knows how far he’d go. Street smarts were of more use to him than the kind of education they wanted to force on him. If all these educated people were so dense, tearing up that university application form was the best decision he’d taken in a long time.
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