Surviving the Un-survivable

It happened here - right in front of the school. There was a school activity yet my friends were running late. “I need to call them” I told myself, knowing that lateness meant getting punished. Getting out of the school gate I crossed the road and cannot remember what transpired after that.
When I woke up both my legs were hanged up with thick white dressings. My neck felt stiff, but my eyes though sore could make out the white walls around me. “Hospital!” I asked myself, “What am I doing in a hospital?”
“You were knocked down by car,” I heard my father’s voice state. “A car-r” I strained to say the words but my voice was creased with pain filled cramps. “She is lucky – she could have died” I heard an unfamiliar voice mutter.
“There so many accidents along that road…” I had another feminine voice speak out.
I could not fully comprehend the whole event and just wanted to keep my eyes shut for a little longer. Slowly the scene came right to my fore brain as I tried to make out what had happened to me, questioning myself.
“There I am crossing the road…going where….” I wondered. Then I remembered “going to call Neria and Maria, my friends who live just opposite the school.” Then it struck me – yes they were about to get late for school so I had gone to call them. I could not recall what hit me. So I opened my eyes again.
“She has regained consciousness,” an excited voice said. I noticed it was my sister when she bent over. “Shortly a nurse came to examine me.
Three months later I had the whole story before me. “A speeding taxi knocked you and the driver run away. It was the driver in the next taxi that picked you and toke me to Mengo Hospital, where you lay in a coma for about twelve hours,” my sister explained.
I recalled my family’s murmurs of joy as I regained full conscious. It was good to be back.
Now staring at that same spot I recollected it all. A sad sensation twisted in me as I looked into the newspaper, I had just bought and read a headline ‘Uganda Leads Great Lakes Region in Road Accident Deaths.’ Daily many lives were snatched inconveniently on the Ugandan road. People just slipped away without saying goodbye.