Reminiscence #2

Sadly I wasn’t chanced today and couldn’t draw. To cover up I decided to make another post in some of my adventures (just a glimpse of them).
I started this post with an eye, an eye I drew sometime in September last year. While editing it though, I fell in love with the idea of it representing Smaug (even though it is not his).
It wasn’t till I was making the post that I remembered his conversation with Bilbo after being told that the legends fell short of his appearance.
My favorite part is “my teeth is…… my body is…….. my wing is……and my breath death”. And when he left the mountain in the recent Desolation movie and said; “I am fire, I am death” and Bilbo sighed “what have we done”, my heart melted especially with Ed Sheeran’s guitar line 🥳.

Above is a shot I took with my little friend. He is the son of an extended family member and usually stays at my Uncle’s place after school till his parents come to pick him on their way back from work. You see, some two years ago my fiancée left me and in the space of 3 months or so, he got married. This left me devastated because I felt used and thought I’d wasted 3 years of my life on someone who was just playing me the whole time. Because of this, I cut myself off from people and humanity entirely and couldn’t care less.
But then early last year when I moved to my Uncle’s state and was searching for a place to rent, he convinced me to stay with him instead and that was where I met this boy. And for the first time in months, I felt alive again.
He kind of reminded me of a line from one movie I’d seen years back titled ‘The Warrior’s Way’. In it the good-bad guy said; “this new world, without you, is not so new”.
This young lad didn’t know that just by existing and following me around wherever I went, he had made me feel alive again and that speaks a lot to the importance of children and having them around.

Here I was doing some field work amidst a workshop held in February and I took this shot. We would later go on to host an exhibition in May and sadly, my teammates omitted my name. I hurt a lot you know cause I could’ve done the same and claimed the work for myself but I waited to get a response from them but as it turned out, they didn’t have the same mind.
I spent a lot of money going to the exhibition you know cause at the time I was two states away only to find that my name was not included 🤦🏽‍♂️.

In March me and some colleagues went on a field trip and the Cultural Center in one of the oldest Universities was our first stop.

Then we moved on to the palace of one of the most revered traditional rulers. He gave us a time slot which we didn’t meet and because of that weren’t able to see him. But I was able to take some shots though. This was the outer court.

Above is the inner court

There was a museum in the palace and we decided to stop by and see what they had.

This man was giving us a tour around the different palaces in the court as well as telling us the meaning and significance of the carvings around the place.
I’ll probably make a post on that later.

Then we went to a place called the drum palace. There were so many instruments there and I learnt a lot of things about my mother's people and language. It was there that I fully understood some of the things about her language that I’d been struggling to grasp since I was a kid.
And I came to find that his story telling and practical approach helped me with this.
Here I felt like a griot 😁.

We then moved in to a sacred site and this was at the entrance. It was sculpted by Susanne Wenger and upon seeing it, I decided to capture it.

Here I was at a part of the sacred site and the bridge I was standing on was constructed in the 1930s. The design allowed it to swing and as soon as my colleague felt it moving, most of them scram 😅, giving me this shot. Albeit, the camera guy didn’t do justice to it the way I did for him.
Anyways, we move on.

This was the step to a waterfall between a mountain. Those men you see are drumming for money. We didn’t give them much though cause our heart was set on the hike and the setting was not the kind of place for dancing.