D I D Y O U K N O W…?

What happened next I think surprised everybody equally.

I had just came home from a school event, all dressed up and still high off the fun we had, joyously walking into the living room until I noticed the vibes were off.

The house was a little more silent than normal, and this was the family house, the communal spot for the whole Ba congregation, so this was unusual.

I saw almost all my aunts and uncles on dad’s side, silently whispering to themselves, looking gloom and over-worn by.. some kind of worry.

I made my rounds of greeting, a custom, but no one was really telling me what happened, until my uncle spoke up.

“Your grandfather is at the police station, and they’re threatening to detain him if we don’t turn you guys in.”

You guys as in my sister and I?

What??

Of course I was panicked.

Turns out, my mother had tapped into her connections (remember her aunt, the president’s oldest brother’s wife? yeah) and the governor of the city or precinct ordered for my grandfather to be arrested.

We had to report to the police station to have him released.

So we did. I was 12, my sister was 10, and we looked around the jail like, why in the world are we even here?

It was scary, dark, dirty, scary.

Once we were turned in, and my grandfather released (Thank God), we headed to my grandmother’s on my mom’s side.

We stayed there for a little over a month, as we waited for papers to be processed so we could fly to Virginia, where my mother lived.

We were really lost, unsettled, confused, terrified of what was going to happen next in our little pre-teen lives.

We tried to assimilate into this new family we were delivered to, but it was really hard.

We had become used to our grandparents, the family house, it was comfort and what we knew, and all of it was gone in one blink of an eye.

I was young, frankly a baby but I took it upon myself to fight too..

I decided that after a few weeks there, when no one suspected it, I would make sure my sister and I ran away.

And we did.