‘’I will rather die before my wife’’
I had gone to a shop that sells fairly used bags down my street to get a delivery bag.
On getting there, the owner of the shop was discussing with a lady, who I assume also came to check for a bag.
I was almost concluding my transaction with the man’s daughter when the man made the statement above that left me curious. As a mass communicator 😋, I had been taught that half news is no news so I decided to hang around to listen – and perhaps join in the conversation so as to fully get the gist regarding what led to that astute declaration.
(In shops like that, you can very easily join in a conversation, any type. Even one that doesn’t concern you. All that is required is to simply indicate interest by exclaiming either ‘haa’ or ‘ehn’, jackpot! Welcome to the convo😁).
The lady had exclaimed, ‘ahn ahn, oga why you say so?’
Seemingly unperturbed, the man continued, ‘I dey tell you o, I say e better make I die before my wife, because I know say once my wife dey alive, my children no go suffer’.
He started to narrate to us how he had three shops at Trade Fair market and was doing fine, but suddenly, from one tragedy to another, he lost all three shops and life became hell as he had a family of five, excluding his extended family all of whom depended on him to feed.
‘At a point, his landlord threw his belongings out and he lived with his family in a tailoring shop,’ he said pointing at the shop.
When the shop closed for business at night, him and his family will go into the shop to sleep and wake up very early in the morning to clean themselves and thereafter hang around till night falls. And on and on, the circus continues.
His wife, he said, spent her day going from one warehouse to another searching for where traders offload and buy bags at very cheap prices. Her goal: to buy and resell at a small profit. That was how they managed to feed during that period.
One day, his wife had returned home from the warehouse with one traveling bag which they displayed for sale in front of the tailor’s shop where they slept.
A young man had come to ‘price’ the bag. They told him the price, N2,500.
The young man, according to him, had flung the bag away rudely, claiming that he could only muster N1,500 for it.
But since the amount offered was not up to the price they even bought the item, they had to let him go.
The wife had thereafter picked up the bag from where it landed on the floor, and, while attempting to clean the dust off it, began to open the side zips.
It was in one of such zips that she opened that she found some dollars.
Excitedly, she had called out to her husband and soon afterwards, they went to change the money, and that was how their lives changed for better, forever!
The naira equivalent that they got from the dollar exchange amounted to N800,000.
Nya, eight hundred thouuuuuuuuuuussssaaannnnd naira!!!!!!!!!
Whew!
Talk about turn around miracles.
They now have a big shop where they sell beautiful bags like the one in the picture.
Till date, the wife still goes to warehouses to buy from offloading containers, but this time, she has a larger customer base as she supplies to retailers and return the ones she didn’t sell to the shop which her husband manages, to display and sell them off.
Women, indeed, are made up of the word, industriousness; much like bread and butter.
After making my purchase, I expectantly opened all five zips of this bag, but lo and behold, not even one Iranian Rial did I find 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭.