SPECIAL FEATURE: MIFUELAYO MICHAEL OJEIFO, PART II
PART II: DEBBY
an essay by Mifuelayo Michael Ojeifo, a Nigerian poet and musician currently studying in the United States. This is the second piece in a series. Part I can be found here.
Around the spring of 2016, I moved to Ghana to visit my siblings. I stayed with my brother, Roje, in Accra for about a month or two. My sister Debby visited us a couple of times, and I remember we went to see a movie - Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. It was epic for me. After that I moved in with Debby, away from Accra. She was living in Sunyani, Ghana. It was our first foray living away from home together, so it was definitely special. Debby had already gone through a series of trials, and when Debby took me in, she was living in a room in a hostel with other students. I soon became friends with a couple of them. Every now and then her friends would come visit us, which was fun, considering we needed people to share our life story with and hear theirs, as well.
Debby had previously lived in a different hostel and had to move because of the unexpected number of snakes that she saw in her room at one point. I remember that day. It was a rough day. I was scared she’d been bitten, but she was fine. I was still in Nigeria at the time, and I remember her recalling the incident on the phone and in person: “I opened the door and I saw the first one and I flew! I jumped!” In the current hostel where I was living with Debby, I also had fears of snakes and all sorts of animals. I was constantly scared of the dark, especially when fetching water, or when the power went out, which is something extraordinarily common in African countries. But as I went on living, the fears slowly went away.
I’d watched my sister take care of me, take care of my brother, and take care of herself. She was unbelievable for a 19 -year- old. She basically bossed the whole hostel, full of guys! And she slowly turned me and Roje into independent men, while also dealing with a breakup from a three-year relationship. SHE WAS TOUGH. AND STILL IS. She figured out a way to budget for the three of us, while using the resources mostly available for just one person. We went hungry, but we didn’t go hungry much.
At this time my brother had moved away from Accra to come live with us in Sunyani. His place in Accra was getting too expensive for him, and it was also not the best spot. I have amazing memories of how he always played soccer with me outside of his place in Accra when I was staying with him. It was lovely. We both loved soccer very much, and I always wanted to be a soccer player. I was dead serious about it. But a cool aspect of my life has been the ability to adapt to changing goals or paths when necessary. And Debby often had the solution to a lot of problems. If me and Roje had questions, we went to Debby. If we needed answers, Debby had them. If we needed to talk, we talked to Debby.
At the time that we were living with her in Sunyani, she was making clothes and garnering customers for her personal brand and tailoring services. She was also ahead of her time. She had been drawing since she was a kid, and was ALWAYS drawing clothes, patterns and designs. In Ghana she would go to the beach, or any spot that provided opportunity, and sell her clothes to passersby. She would then come home, ask us if we did what she said we should do while she was out, and we would make sure that we had done everything she asked. Most days were usually spent that way. Some days we would hang with her friends, the boys in the hostel, and we would all just do something special, like hang out and eat, or cook, or play Fifa tournaments.
The boys all respected Debby, and she showed respect to them, as well. The way she carried herself you just knew she was a very sophisticated and intense figure. I think Debby is a born leader, a born CEO. She always knew, and still knows, how to do what is necessary to survive and make life more bearable.