Her mother paid her way into slavery

In search of Gold, in search of dollars. She is a big trader in one of the big cities in the city and by all standards neither she nor her husband could be said to be poor, at least, by the city’s standard. Yes. Remember, a rich man in that city is a poor man in the city beside the Lagoon or the Sahara. But as it is the case in all human affairs, each time we arrive our destination we always realize we have actually not reached the destination; as soon as we become the millionaire of the neighborhood, we begin the journey towards becoming the billionaire of the city.

The woman of interest to me today has friends whose children are living across the Mediterranean. Despite her stable and comfortable condition, financially speaking, she wants one of her children to ‘travel’. She always looked forward to that day when one of her children would bid Nigeria bye and finally too.

Yes. The urge to travel is innate in us as all as humans. In fact, our life is all about journeys; it is all about departures and arrivals; the departure from the unknown to the known; the departure from our mothers’ womb to the world and from the world into the tomb. I have since learnt, in line with Augustine of Hippo, that the world is like a book; not to travel is to read only one page of the book. But Islam forbids travelling for travelling sake. Islam forbids putting one’s head on the scaffold just because one desires the better life.

Eventually it came to pass that the woman got information about people who help ‘people’ travel and she immediately sent words to them that she would want her daughter to travel too. She demanded to know how much it would cost for the journey to come into reality. “Not much” she was told. She was asked to raise a sum of five hundred thousand naira only for the ‘agents’.

And so it came to pass that the woman began to look for the money. And so it came to pass that the girl who was billed to ‘travel’ equally began to make preparations for her journey; her journey to the promised-land; her journey to Libya and from Libya, across the Mediterranean, to the land of magic where the Euro, Pound Sterling and Dollars are picked like ripened fruits from the streets. “She just wants to travel” she told her friends. No that other lady wants to go to Italy. Yes. She has been told there are ‘jobs’ for young ladies over there. “I must travel’ she told herself.