We were five women sharing a rented room in Nairobi. Five women with different nationalities and religions sharing two beds, one public bath and many many stickers of women breaking rocks and stones.
We used to write letters to one another to pass time and take out minds off our burdens. If you ever visit our worldwide room, you may find our letters entitled: ” From Katherine to Aisha”, ” Aisha to Elizabeth.”, ” Rachel to Karina.” and ” Karina to Aisha.” You may find the smell of our common room is a mixture of salt and honey.
We are five women covered with sweat and blood, full of pain and power, looking for our tomorrow from our narrow upper window. We have nothing but ourselves, every morning, we feel ready to go to our yard of daily struggles, every day, the broiling sun calls us to come and dissolve ourselves under her boiling rays, and we can’t say no because this is the way we make our living.
Although we have grown tired of everything, we never break the rocks with heavy hearts. Although the sun of Nairobi pours her boiling anger upon our heads, we never decide to flee.
If you plan to visit our room and settle for a while, you may discover many wishes carved on the walls, or written in the papers, which reveals how long we wished to buy some beauty products to beautify our horrible looking fingers, to turn them into women’s fingers. If you decided to rent our room, you would figure out how terrible our fingers were and, and believe or not, our boss’ fingers were nicer than our fingers.
We were five sisters who shared a single rented room and a hundred unforgotten memories. We were five until that day. We were together until that accident.
Today, I am the only one who survived that exploding in our rock yard, and I am writing to ask that if you plan to rent our worldwide room in Nairobi, keep our memories alive and give our room to people who would share love, peace, and bread.
Amirah Al Wassif is a freelance writer from Egypt. She has written articles, novels, short stories poems and songs. Five of her books were written in Arabic and many of her English works have been published in various cultural magazines. Amirah is passionate about producing literary works for children, teens, and adults which represent cultures from around the world. Her first book, Who do not Eat Chocolate was published in 2014 and her latest illustrated book, The Cocoa Book and Other Stories is forthcoming.