regional delegate of the state invited the establishment members of the region and the ministry of education workers to share the buffet with him in a classroom near the principal’s office. The rest of the crowd also had their own collation at the courtyard. I couldn’t eat much, I focused my entire person returning to the city, even though the trip was a success; I had some personal things to do on that same day.
But thirty minutes later, we were still there, impatiently waiting for mister minister to finish this very long discussion he had with the governor. I was complaining in my head about the length of that discussion and bored like never when I heard a voice calling me:
“Paul, Paul come.”
Gracefully, his discussion with the governor had ended and we could now leave. So I hurried to find out why he was calling me with so much excitement. When I came close to him, I was delighted by his first words to me; he knew how to stimulate and thank his workers.
“You did an outstanding job, Paul, I’m proud of you. Just maintain these qualities, in some years, you will become a minister too.”
“Thank you, sir, thank you very much, sir,” I said, grinning. This wasn’t the first time I received these motivational words from him. For me, it had always been a great honor to be acknowledged by such an established person like him.
As I was still seriously enjoying these appreciations, I saw him putting his hand into his right pocket and then pulling out cash. Despite being rich, the amount he displayed shocked me. A second later, he just pointed it at me without even embarrassing himself of counting it and said:
“Take this; distribute it to every single person who assisted you during the equipment installation.”
“But sir, the budget…” I shyly tried to object. For me, it was a little too much even though I appreciated his intentions. But as generous as he was, I couldn’t stop him.
“Do as I say,” he replied quickly without letting me finish my sentence, “you will understand later,” he added.
That was why people loved him so much; he always had the good words, the perfect attitude with people. He was a brilliant mix of charity and charisma. I had a great admiration for his personality and a real desire to resemble him even a little. With my timidity, my agoraphobia, my introversion and my clear lack of charisma, it wasn’t hard to say that I was his opposite. Adding my stinginess to all these characteristics, the list of my faults will be complete.
Thirty minutes later, we were finally on our way back to the capital city. After expecting an eventual new modification in our planning of the day, I was closer to mister minister by traveling back in his car and left my own to one of my subalterns. But twenty minutes later, I started to feel insecure and regretted my choice because of the high speed at which we were traveling. My heartbeat was rising every time we passed near one of those gigantic trucks specialized in wood transportation and frequent user of this highway to assure the connection between the coast and the interior of the country. While I was stressing and trembling because of the dangerous ride of the driver, the others were not showing any sign of alarm, among them, the minister who was even comfortable with this tempo. After praising the driver, he was now absorbed in a phone discussion. I could hear him saying: “my love, yes my love” what made me conclude that he was surely discussing with his wife, Mister Agbwala was a married man with three kids.
After he ended his phone call, he gave an instruction to the security guard at the front seat. Subsequently, the man transmitted the order to the driver before a long silence took place. I was a little frustrated; usually, mister minister will communicate to me this order before everybody. But this time, I had to suffer to be out of the process. Knowing that the main reason I was physically close to him was to know of any information and any modification, I couldn’t feel anything else than dissatisfaction. The only thing I could do was to guess our next stop because, for me, we will surely not go directly to the office. My intuitions were confirmed some minutes later when we arrived at the periphery of the city and the driver took the road going to the business district instead of the left street of the junction. I then concluded that we will surely hold a meeting at a hotel to discuss briefly, our next plan when the driver turned at the city’s main boulevard with his multiple hotels five minutes later. But I couldn’t imagine that our destination will be at the Atlantique hotel, a marvelous place known for its quality of service and architecture and also selective even for those who were not discouraged enough by the elevated prices of the rooms. Even though all this beauty delighted me, the feeling that I had since the marginalization I suffered thirty minutes ago when mister minister kept me away from the information he transmitted to his driver, turned darker immediately we penetrated the five-star hotel. The bad reputation of this place was all over my head. The hotel was not only known for its splendor; many other stories about mysterious cults holding meetings there and organized prostitution occurring in this same place rubbished the image of the “Atlantique” these last years. Adding the fact that mister minister barely came to this hotel in my presence and that we had held no meeting there in the past, it became very difficult for me not to have in mind all those rumors that stated that my boss was a member of a cult and that he also secretly used to come there for his dirty activities. His behavior was not just helping; he had just left us at the hotel hall and went to the elevator with only one bodyguard without telling me anything. I was now troubled; a victim of every kind of dark thoughts, doubts, and mystery always go in pairs, and his actions were mysterious. I couldn’t get these suspicions out of my head, whenever the beauty of the hotel got me absorbed, the length of his absence will subsequently turn back into thoughts.
Gracefully, the wait finally ended and mister Agbwalla impedes my uncertainties and my frustrations subsequently when he asked me to excuse his previous attitude, blaming it on a family emergency. I was so enchanted by the way he presented his excuses I forgot to ask whether the problem he mentioned had finally been solved; he just wowed me by displaying so much humility. What a great man!
Five minutes later, we were moving out of the hotel on our way to the parking lot, when we met with a group of street children; four little boys in a dirty outer shell, they all looked hungry and weary. Their appearance was a clear example of the consequences of poverty in our country. The grimness of their frizzy hair made them look like neglected dogs in the street. Immediately they saw us, they started begging for money. Insistently. Their dirtiness was in perfect dissimilarity with the luxurious environment around them and made their presence turn into a serious proof of the incompetence of the security guards of this hotel. After the minister’s bodyguard noticed that they were a little too close to us, they decided to rudely make them go away. As they were dealing with them, the minister intervened:
“It’s ok, it’s ok, leave them…” he shouted to the bodyguards.
Even though we all knew how generous he was, his reaction was a little too exaggerated, knowing that the guards were only doing their job.
Subsequently, he took the oldest boy of the group apart and started questioning him.
“Tell me, young man, what are you people doing here? He asked gently.
“Our parents are dead sir, I’m with my brothers, we are looking for something to eat, anything to calm our hunger. We used to sell groundnuts and clean people’s shoes when some guys stole our equipment three days ago.”
“Hmmm…” Mister minister reacted before calling one of his bodyguards to give him some instructions.
We could hear the kids shouting out their happiness and expressing their gratitude towards the unexpected benefactor mister Agbwala was. Even though I couldn’t know what mister minister gave them to provoke this spectacular mood change, I was deeply impressed again by his bigheartedness. He was such a charitable man. I would have surely not acted the same. I usually hesitated before giving money to these abandoned children, and this behavior was because of my opinion on the topic. There was an amplification of the number of children in the streets,