Trafficked

Chapter 2

Her journey on he highway of life had been a long walk to perdition. She had not always been a 'persona non grata', as she had not found herself in the recent past.

There was a time when people- especially her father and mother-had thought the sun resided in her smile. That was a time past, a time lost.

She had been a happy child, avidly exploring the world around her and finding fun in all she did. She teased her teachers, annoyed her class mates and irritated her two sisters and brothers. Even visitors did not escape her inquisitive questions,some of them embarrassing, to say the least.

"What is that ugly lump in front of your neck and your jaw?" She asked a woman suffering from goitre.

And when a neighbor her parents had discussed at length the previous day visited, she demanded,

"Have you come to finish our food? You always come here when we are eating. Go and eat in your own house." She was merely repeating what she heard the adults say.

"Shut up!!" Had been all her mortified parents could say.

She subjected a mother of six daughters to an inquisition one day after church.

"Why is it that you give birth to only girls?" She had querried, her eyes challenging. The poor mother of many eves had gone home sadder than ever, determined to try again for a male child. The woman had died in the attempt, a year later. It was a male. A still born baby.

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"What is your name?" people would ask the little girl when they met her. Some of them could not keep their hands off her. Some patted her head, some touched her cheeks and others touched her back, buttocks or her flat chest. She had been a lovely child.

"My name is Jenna," she answered immediately, eyes twinkling.

"Whats your fathers name?" they would ask.

"My fathers name is Jake Hampson. Do you have a father she added

"yes I have a father," someone would answer

"I like my father," she said without being asked,"He's a good man".

She grew up a loved and cherished child in a peaceful home in which she was the third of four children.  

Her childhood was spent in Aristota where her father was a clerk in the international revenue department in the ministry of finance.

Jake Hampson had worked hard as a clerk though he did not consider the work challenging enough for a man of his abilities. His doting mother encourages this assessment as he grew up. He hated the post of clerk but unfortunately did not have the resources to register for the London matriculation examination like other intellectual less endowed but wealthier colleagues. He regarded himself as a family man, having done his best to train his children in school and provide for them and their mother.

He knew, of course, that his wife, Michelle , an energetic market trader, brought in more income than he did. But these things were not voiced, for a woman's wealth belonged to her husband.

Was it not their ancestors who pronounced that a woman who neglects or disrespects her husband will become destitute? "This to do so ever," Jake Hampson said time without number.

He enjoyed the love and respected his wife and was proud of her and her cooking.

"What have you cooked for dinner?" He would say as soon as he entered the house after playing fraught with his friends.

He would sit in his favorite chair and wait to be served his dinner

The children would besiege him and regale him with stories of what had happened in school that day.

Jenna, his favorite child, would perch on his knee and pulling his moustache playfully, asking him what work he had done in the office, instead of telling him what she had done at school as his other children did.

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