EssayStoryJournalBook reviewReflectionResearchLetterPoemMemoir872 words4 min readAutosave enabledThe next day, Martha decided to leave for the convent. She had met Sister Patricia in church a year ago and she always stroked her as more than any of those mentors she had been able to talk to concerning her life and its many shortcomings that never seemed to come to an end. Sister Patricia was one of those white missionaries of the Franciscan sisters with sole aim of spreading God’s word to Africans who always seemed to lag behind when it came to any sort of evolution, whether in religion or industrialization. With the long blonde hair that she always tied on the upper part of her head behind to form a neat pony tail that seemed to always swing back and forth as she walked even with the slightest of the winds. She really envied those long soft hairs compared to her short kinky hair that of late appeared to have stopped growing and slightly turning colour to brown at the edges despite the many attempts of visiting the salon. Sister Patricia unlike most other white women who always wanted to appear superior to all the other black women because of the mere fact that their skin tone was white, had long soft hair that could easily form pony tails with no need for weaves and silly wigs that were also damn expensive to maintain let alone purchasing them in the first place, coloured pupils etcetera. With the nun, Martha was an open book of her situations and experiences as the nun always came up with a solution no matter how embarrassing and awfully personal the problem could be without giving her those eyes of “how stupid can you get?” that she sometimes thought she got from her friends and siblings after she explained whatever was going on in her life. It had been close to a year since she had gone for mass hence had been quite a while since they had one of those hard talks with the nun, from how Kenyan political leaders favoured only two tribes as numbers came with power, how obsolete the Kenyan education system was to why she had to consider breaking up with her boyfriend who was always acting as a loser. Not that she was losing faith in God but actually the all-going-to-church thing now appeared like the Father Christmas now. As a child she had always had the energy total commitment to going to church regularly without questioning, but now she was grown up and “the Father Christmas” fairy tale was now in question given that she now recognized Father Christmas as the plump guy leaving in the next estate to theirs whose character was always questionable. The nun was really excited to see her if that could be taken as implication from her continuous smiling and eagerness to share with her about her recent experiences at a new parish she had gone visiting with sole reason of preaching to women about being faithful to one true God and holding a married-women seminar to teach them of having respect for their marriages and giving hope in cases where the marriage was facing hardship mostly as a result of the husbands’ unfaithfulness to their wives. Martha always thought that the missionaries were the sole reason for the increment in unfaithfulness amongst husbands as they advocated for Christianity which apparently did not stomach most of the African cultural practices like polygamy. This insistence on monogamy forced men into slavery of having to be satisfied by one woman who clearly had proven futile if that could be said of the increase in infidelity. Moreover, the bad economic times characterized by financial instability also worked against polygamy as marrying more than one wife and providing for more than one family proved really expensive even for the not-so-poor fellows. “Do you want anything to drink?” she asked as she turned towards the kitchen. “Hot Lemon please”, she answered aware of her cheeks reddening and her nose itching prior to another sneeze. She suspected to have gotten a cold the previous day at the embassy as she had sat opposite an agent who had constantly been sneezing and turning away occasionally to dry his nose of any hint of mucus, this had actually worked in her favour as out of nowhere she actually had gained confidence despite the shyness that she felt overwhelmed with moments prior to her chance to see an agent, all from terror of being told that she did not have all the required documents and what not. Being told to go back and come with more documents to the embassy the next day seemed to be the worst thing that could happen remembering how queues could get awfully long sometimes. “There you go. It will help with your condition”, Sister Patricia said as she placed a mug of hot lemon on the table and took a step back to reach for a seat behind her, which she calmly sank in and doing the sign of the cross to show the starting of a prayer. “Amen” Martha whispered more to herself as she tried to seat more upright to reach for the hot lemon on the table when the nun finished praying.