Lockdown in Owerri

Easter Sunday and the churches are closed. All of them. By order. I have lived in Owerri my whole life and I have never heard the city on a Sunday morning without loudspeakers, and it turns out that underneath there are birds.

I want to be honest about the relief, because it is not a pretty feeling. For the first Sunday in twenty-three years nobody is performing anything, because there is nowhere to perform it. The aunties are at home. The choir master is at home. The pastor is on WhatsApp, which is easier to close.

And I want to be honest about the cost, because the relief is mine and the cost is everyone's. The woman under the umbrella has no one to sell to. The okada boys have been sent home. Mama's neighbour, who sells at the market, has three weeks of nothing coming in and four children. In a city where you eat what you sold yesterday, staying home is not a health measure, it is a slow hunger, and the government's bags of rice went, as everybody knew they would, to the people who did not need them.

E. and I are in the room by the stadium with a bag of garri and a carton of sardines and a phone that gets the news. Two men, indoors, for weeks, and for once the whole city has an excuse for it. I am not going to pretend that is not the best thing about the plague.