Influence and impact don’t necessarily come with titles.

Saturday 5:30p.m.- The Big Bang!

It was about 5:30p.m. when all of a sudden I heard a loud sound out of my window. Shortly after that I heard the voices of little children in the neighborhood laughing as a more elderly female voice scolded at someone I was yet to find out. I looked out of my window and saw a young boy in his teens lying on the tarred road while the little kids surrounded him and just watched. At this point the angry girl turned and began walking away while the boy still lay there with his bicycle in a pretty bad shape. Immediately I ran out of the house to the scene and told the kids to move back. Now what I saw got me shaking in my boots. There was blood on the road and he was foaming from his mouth with his tongue out. His eyes had overturned backwards and he kept on shaking vigorously. This incident happened in CampSic Buea in Cameroon and by the very nature of the environment in which we lived getting to the road was a long walk if you had no car. It was a closed residential area and I stood there wondering what I was going to do. The first thing that came to my mind and which I did was to grab the boy who was now in an unconscious state but still shaking in my arms and I began to pray while I crying out for help. My younger brother turned Hussein Bolt at that moment began racing to the road to get a cab. From no where we saw a car coming into the neighborhood and we pleaded for a lift. The good Samaritan helped me with the boy as we got into the car and headed off to the hospital. My shirt and hands were covered with blood. His head was swollen and I just prayed and kept saying “You will live and not die” as I watched him fight in his spirit to stay alive. In the hospital things went from bad to worse. We placed him on the bed and he began to shake with his chest rising up as if it was his last breath and then falling back again. I held him tight now with the help of another nurse. The contractions got stronger and I could see how he struggled with life leaving his body still in his unconscious state.

His Story

The story about this boy was a sad one. He was the first child of a family of 4 with a mother who was just poor farmer. His father had just past on a few months earlier and his step mum and kids organized and threw them out of the house. A fight ensued and he threatened to deal with his step mum and family. This landed him in prison but being a minor, he was sent to a correctional facility for delinquent kids after spending a few months in jail. It was from this correctional facility that he got the bike from a friend and began riding in our neighborhood before this calamity befell him. He had been riding his bicycle when he hit the girl I mentioned at the begin and this projected him off unto the tarred road where he made a direct head-on collision of  full impact with the road. So back to my story. I paid the money needed by the Doctor’s to begin the work on him only to be told that they didn’t have the right equipment to know what the main issue was. You can imagine how angry I became. To cut a long story short a lot happened in between and finally in another hospital (very expensive one at that), it was revealed to us that the impact he made with road resulted in him cutting a vein at the back of his neck and because he hadn’t been attended to for a couple of days (due to the lack of money and the hospital demanding we pay before anything could commence), some purse had begun accumulating in his brain and it required an expensive operation if he had to make it alive and still be sane.

Help! Help!

I never knew this boy, wasn’t the Founder of a non-profit, and neither did I work with one but I felt that if I didn’t do something about it nobody would and so I went on radio, wrote letters to churches, to my family members, friends, youth ministries in fact I did everything I could to raise money for the operation. Our largest single donation came from a US-based nonprofit African Renaissance Ambassador. Through this help and all the support I got this boy was operated upon and today he is alive! This happened in 2009 or thereabout. Due to the impact on his brain I was told he experienced memory loss but began to remember a few things again. I am sure he is doing very well today. Thanks to the generous contributions of organizations like African Renaissance Ambassador and others, a precious life was saved. You don’t need to be the Founder of a nonprofit in order to be of service to humanity. Do what you can with what you have and we will see more good in our world.