I picked up and on the other side speaks Lunga. He is completely freaked out I can hear it in his voice as he starters, struggling to catch his breath "bhuti Eddie, bhuti Sboniso ucule..uculekile akanyakati" He is unconcious and cannot move at this time? Why now? What could have happened? This does not make sense to me. The phone cuts off and I immediately call back just to get the missing details of this delayed prank, because even when you know a person is lying to you, your curiousity makes you try and get the full details of the lie before you can dismiss it.
Lunga picks up before the second ring starts: "Hello?"
"Lunga, just tell me what the problem is. Why is he uncounsious? What happened?"
Lunga does not know. He found him like that in the kitchen and struggled to get him up. It was no prank. I could hear the voice of Nomvula crying in the background beckoning for her brother to say something , all to no avail.
On Friday afternoon Sboniso and Lunga got a call from Samantha, my younger sister who is a student at TUT Nelspruit campus saying they were celebrating a friends birthday at Cayotes, ShisaNyama in Nelspruit. They rushed to town and found all kinds of booze set up on the tables and were told they could help themselves to whatever they liked: Spirits, Ciders and Beers only. My younger brother Sboniso, just like my older brother Sfiso and Sboniso's twin brother from another mother, Thando, all do not like eating when they are drinking. Their excuse is that they lose appetite for food once ghey start drinking but sometimes they tell you the food makes them sober up and that to them defeats the purpose of drinking: "We will eat when we go to sleep" my older brother would say "Not while we are still drinking. Nyofa wena because you like food so much." "I am a drinker not a eater", Sboniso would say. And when they get home, they are ususally too drunk to eat and they just fall asleep until the next day.
This is what happened with Sboniso on this day at Cayotes. They got back home in the early hours of the morning and he in particular, slept until the afternoon. When he woke up, as he relates the story later, he tried to eat his dinner plate from the previous night but he felt the food could not go down. He thought maybe if he got one beer to cure the hangover, then he would be able to eat. He went and got a court, 750ml of beer and drank it. The funny thing is that after he finished the beer he did not feel hungry anymore. He looked at the time and thought, it is afternoon anyways, good time to start drinking so he went and got another two courts for himself. This time Lunga is feeling like "nuh, I can't drink today, I'm recovering from last night" and watching tv. Sboniso plays some music for himself and tries to call up some friends or a girlfriend to chill and drink with, with no luck until a friend he was hardly considering for some reasons known to him alone, gives him a call telling him he has a bottle of Skyy Vodka, if he can bring some mixers, they have a party. Of course the mixers mean more than just the drinks. You cannot have a party with just guys now, can you?
My brother got dressed up, called and directed a few female friends to his friend's place and headed the same way himself.
By 23.00 their vodka was done so they went to the nearest tarven for a few more drinks and found there was a good time there and stayed on. The funtime went on till 02.30 with my brother not getting any skirt to take home with yet again.
He was woken up in the morning by his good friend Banele who got his missed call from the night before while he was at work doing a nightshift. They spoke and Banele said he was on his way to pick him up, he needed Sboniso to accompany him to this two church girls who wanted him to drive them to church. They went and met the two lovely girls dressed for the Lord. Dropped them off at church then went to the complex to get a six pack of beers to chill. Four beers down Banele felt like sleeping so he dropped Sboniso off at home with the beers and drove home. Sboniso chilled alone for about an hour watching a movie, still not thinking about food until he fell asleep with an open beer in his hand.
He woke up at around 8pm opened his phone and texted his girlfriend to come over. That is when he realised he might need some energy, so he walked up to the kitchen to try and fix himself something to eat.
He reached out to the fridge as he normally does to look for his dinner plate that gets stored away whenever he is not home for dinner. He felt a tinge in his finger, then it spread through the whole hand, then suddenly he felt like his whole arm just got electrocuted, then his whole body. A cold sweat covered him. He felt woozy and suddenly his vision got blurry. A thud was heard as he fell flat on the floor on his back. He could not see anymore. He tried to call out for help but the words escaped him. He screamed but even he could not hear his own screams. His voice was gone. His sight was gone. He felt the way one feels when they are caught between a dream state and a waking state; you know when you try to wake up and you cannot? You tell yourself that you are now moving your arm but it does not move? They used to tell us it was because there was a spiderweb going above our sleeping heads, but we never saw them when we finally woke up. However what Sboniso was going through was worse than that. He could feel himself getting weaker. He could feel the energy slowly leaving his body and thought to himself, "this must be what death feels like" and started wishing he had spent the weekened with his son instead. He saw himself hovering over his helpless body looking at it twitching uncontrollably on the floor. He could hear Lunga and Nomvula rushing to his aid. He could hear his younger siblings troubled voices calling for him to open his eyes, 'say something, get up! Just do something to show you are still alive damnit!'
The trauma the kids must have felt watching their older brother's helpless twitching body on the cold tiled kitchen floor without a shirt on. Lunga rushed out to get help and soon they were at the local clinic. The clinic could not help them, they said he was critical so they reffered them to the hospital "though it will be too late for him if you wait for the ambulance, they take a long time to get here." said the concerened nurse on duty. They had to drive him there on the neighbour's car. On their way to the hospital his mouth moved as if he wanted to say something, they feared he might be trying to say his last words so they asked him to save his energy until they got to the hospital. Lunga's phone and Sboniso's phone both ringing off the hook! Concerned family members worried and trying to get an update but Lunga could not get himself to pick up any of the calls. He wouldn't know what to tell everyone just yet. His young big head was swelling up with worry. He was praying and crying at the same time. He could hear himself crying, but he was unaware of the short prayers he was sending out on his brother's behalf asking the Lord not to take him just yet.
They arrived at Robs hospital and found the line was long with injury patients; a long line of bleeding people who appeared more emergencies than a semi-unconscious young man pushed on a wheelchair. Lunga went up to the reception and told them they have a critical patient who was reffered from the Kanyamazane Clinic. Fortunately they could attend them quick after checking their refferal letter. The nurse checked for his pulse and opened his eyes to check on his pupils then quickly rushed him to a room and connected a drip on him. She then explained that "he had been drained of all bodily fluids and his internal organs were slowly shutting down. He would be okay though since he is now being re-hydrated. What happened? Has he been poisoned?" she asked.
This reminded me of something that had happened to me a few year ago when I was still living alone. I arrived home drunk after having finished two bottles of red wine in one night. I was at a party with some friends, hence so much drinking. I can barely finish a single bottle on an ordinary night. Two bottles was too much. I woke up in the morning feeling too weak to even get up to piss. I felt so dehydrated I could hardly open my eyes: I could feel the eyelids scratching on the eyeballs as I tried to open them. When I tried to open my mouth, I felt the tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. My mouth was that dry! I was hungry! Starved even but I could not get up. I thought maybe if I went back to sleep for another hour I could recuperate. I tried but when I woke, I felt worse than before. I had to get something in my body but I could hardly lift my own hand. Luckily my cellphone was just under my pillow so I reached out to it and called my sister. When I tried to speak, I felt fumes, like petrol fumes come out of my mouth and the voice forced itself through my dry throat. It sounded gruff and horse like a horse's voice. It hurt my throat to speak and I suddenly realised I had a terrible headache. I could not lift my head. I could not get up from the bed to go piss but I was breathing. My sister came through and splashed water on my face, which suprisingly boosted me a little, then gave me a glass to drink while she fixed me something to eat. It took me a whole 24 hours to recover from that. The whole day I was not my full self.
Alcohol is easily accessible in our communities and it is taken for granted so much so that even little kids have ready access to it. We forget how dangerous alcohol can be not only to kids but to us grown ups too. We have never had training on how to handle this dangerous substance. We were never orientated into this drinking part of life that many of us find ourselves having to maneuver through blindly relying on our own experiences to give us warnings and lessons on what to and what not to drink; when to and when not to drink! All of this is scary because we do not have enough lives for trial and error. With alcohol, you make one serious error, you could end up dying and your experience could be a lesson for others coming after you.
It is evident from experience that alcohol seriously dehydrates the body. That in itself is a danger since the human body cannot function without fluids. All internal organs need water to function properly and alcohol drains the body of its water thus leading to the chemical imbalance that is the 'drunk' state.
Also, alcohol is a digestif, meaning it speeds up the digestion of food in the stomach. This is why most of us feel hungry after drinking and we of course cannot drink without having eaten first. No one ever taught us to eat first before drinking, experience taught us that if we drink alcohol on an empty stomach we get too drunk too quick and wake up feeling extremely weak. This could have killed us long ago if it killed. Well it does in fact kill because that is supposedly how alcohol poisoning occurs.
Something very intersting I have learned very recently was that not all alcohol is for everyone, just like not all food types are for all blood types. I subscribe to the bloodtype diet lifestyle and have learned that as a blood type A, beer is poison for me. This is why I only drink red wine. But even the red wine is equally dangerous if I go over one glass a day (250ml). A lot of alcohol drinkers do so irresponsibly in many ways: one way is that they drink anything with a alcohol percentage. Always remember that the higher the alcohol percentage, the quicker it dehydrates you, meaning the quicker it can kill you, or at least weaken you. The higher alcohol percentage is responsible for making young man and woman cough like TB patients with weaker lungs.
I can go on forever on this topic but my main point was the dangers of the accessibility of alcohol in our communities without any available platforms for effectively teaching members of communities about its effects. I recently wrote a book titled The Coach which followed a group of young Chess players on a trip to a National Championship when they decide to experiment with hard liquor. Though a work of fiction, the book is based on actual events, occurences that those who work with kids can attest to having witnessed; groups of kids on trips clubbing money together to buy alcohol. Kids experiment with alcohol on their own without any supervision because they do it in secret. The secrecy of it is where lies the danger. I would not recommend that parents teach their children how to drink, but just like the sex talk which is promoted and encouraged, the drinking talk is also necessary. Children should get these lessons at home first before they make fools of themselves trying to earn street cred by proving they are hard drinkers. Alcohol kills. The warnings on the bottles are not direct enough.
Before I go, always remember to drink lots of water before you go to sleep if you have been drinking. Do this without fail, it might save your life.
Happy Youth Day South Africa
Happy Father's Day to all the father
