Community Chef.

Good day everyone, welcome to my blog.

It was hamatan season in 1997, as usual the radio and television stations had started warning about fire like they always do by this time every year. My mum makes sure to put out all the fire and turn off our television and radio which serve as our appliances before going out.

Each morning, mum would call me to her room to warn me about touching the electronics when our power was restored. In the afternoon she must have gone to the store where she sells dried fish and the likes. In her words she would say Laide ma fi ina sere (Laide don't play with electric light please) emi ko ni aaro (please I need you to be careful because human life has no duplicate) * So I no better not to touch the sockets, plugs or extension but she never warned me about fire. As in real fire.

Meta Ai.

We live in a public compound. In our compound, we have other occupants who are family people like my parents. Most of these people go to work or shop in the morning and return in the evening while we the children go to school and return home in the afternoon. Most afternoons we the children were usually home by ourselves doing our chores and home work.

On that particular afternoon, Sola, one of our neighbor's daughters, suggested we cook rice and stew. She said I don't feel like drinking gari this afternoon, let's cook rice. Tolu asked how is that possible?** then Sola said why not, our parents have all the needed ingredients now, let's just take from their cupboards. We had almost everything needed to cook the meal in our mother's cupboard so each one of us went to their mothers cupboard to bring the needed items. After we had gathered all that was needed to cook our wonderful meal, then the cooking began.

We were cooking on firewood and stone so it was a community children's cooking. In no time, we had finished cooking our white rice. Then we were left with cooking our Stew. We placed our empty pot on the fire and in no time it was dried up then we poured our palm oil in the dry pot for it to bleach.

In the process of bleaching the palm oil it got too hot and brought out fire. The movement I tried to pour sliced onions in it, the fire was so hot and high like it was aiming for the kitchen roof I ran for my dear life. Then came my hero Aunt Kemi, one of our neighbors who was just returning from her waec lesson. Aunt Kemi covered the pot with its lid and the fire went straight down. Immediately the fire went down I went straight to my mother's room to sleep because I had lost my appetite and the small chef skills I thought I had ran out of my body like a cockroach being pursued by a cat.

Thank you for reading, I am @ellizy