Is it better to do good or evil, I at times ask myself. No matter the odds, I shall choose good over evil all of the time hence I shall continue to do good.
Many Ghanaians abroad always talk about their bitter experiences after helping their fellow Ghanaians get jobs, lent them money and other things of the sort. In almost all such situations, those they have helped repaid their kindness with evil.
However, I know since my infancy when I was a pupil at Kumawu Roman Catholic Primary School, after reading a book in which there was a proverbial statement that went, “One good turn deserves another”. This was about a bird that nearly got shot by a hunter. Just as the hunter had pointed his gun at the bird and about to pull the trigger, an ant bit him hard on the neck. Suddenly, the barrel of the gun dropped a bit below its perfect gauge at which he could have landed the bird in his hunter’s bag and the bullet went off bang!
The bird on hearing the loud sound flew off.
One day, the bird found the ant dropped into a river, could not get out but the water moving it downstream and about to be drowned. The bird plucked a leaf from the tree it was sitting in and dropped it into the water. The ant mounted on to the leaf and gradually by gradually, the wind blew the leaf to a solid land to save the ant of its life.
Following this service to one another, it was said, “One good turn deserves another”
However, in my case where I think to have helped create a Jezebel in the life of someone, as it is the bitter experience of many a Ghanaian living abroad, the person I helped is rather paying me with evil.
Here goes the story. Once, a fellow Ghanaian who resides in one of the European countries different from where I live was going home (Ghana) on holiday. She had no place in Kumasi to stay with her friend. She asked if I could help.
I volunteered to contact someone in Kumasi who agreed to accommodate them in his Jamaican friend’s house in Kumasi for about a week or less. This person has his own 10-bedroom house in Kumasi but for the fact that the house was not yet furnished, he preferred they went to his friend’s house which is fully furnished to the standard befitting the stay of a “burger(s)”.
The person helped, later made a proposition to the helper on a subject the helper found a bit difficult, if not too intricate to give her a positive assurance of yes.
Just for the failure to reassure her contrary to her expectation, she came back to her foreign abode and immediately started soiling the helper’s reputation. Among some of the bitter things she said about him to her friends all over the world are;
1. He has no place of his own in Kumasi but lives in his Jamaican friend’s house which he claims to be his.
2. He owes his Jamaican friend £20,000 and his friend is looking for him to cause his arrest any time he returns abroad.
3. He borrowed so much money from friends and the banks and ran away with it to Ghana so the British Police are looking for him to arrest. Subsequently, he would never be able to come back to Britain.
Let me just end here without talking about other bitter things she has said about him, without ending the story completely yet.
Let me ask her, if she had a place of her own, would she come to me to arrange her a place in Kumasi after staying abroad for almost forty years? Did I not tell her in advance that the helper in Ghana says his own house is not yet complete so he could only accommodate them in his Jamaican friend’s house or else, how would she know that the house belonged to a Jamaican if we had not told her?
His Jamaican friend, Mr Kwesi Robinson, as I call him, laughed himself to tears when he heard the allegations. He asked, when did I have £20,000 to lend to my friend? If I had £20,000, I would put £10,000 into my bank account and go to Ghana to do business with the other £10,000, he said.
From which friends and banks did he borrow so much money to run away with to Ghana? Again, he had subsequently been interdicted to come to Britain, she said. Why has he been to Britain and Belgium twice lately and been to some government offices to sort out his pension and other things without being arrested as capriciously alleged by that bitter liar spreading unfounded allegations oozing out of her figment of warped imagination? Is she not rather hallucinating?
What has made her probably similar to the biblical Jezebel is the fact that she has taken her evil-mindedness few steps further into the family of the helper. She has been telling a section of the family adulterated history which they have believed hence creating a tension within that larger family. It is only a Jezebel that can do that.
I am aware of all the falsehoods she has been spreading and how she is pitting the said family members against one another.
In the meantime, I shall advise my own uncle, Nana Damte, who although is unknown to me in person, I had spoken with on two occasions somewhere in year 2003, not to allow himself to be maliciously manipulated by the person I now address as Jezebel.
He is my uncle for the fact of his Abenaaso roots – Nana Fosuaa. I shall not go into it any further but to rest my case.
It is a bitter lesson to me. If I had not intervened to help secure her accommodation with the said helper, she would not have known him let alone, started to talk rubbish and falsehoods about him.
One does not expect anyone to build a house in Ghana despite one’s length of stay abroad. Similarly, one does not expect anyone to be putting up houses in all the major cities in Ghana. Therefore, Jezebel, not having a house in Kumasi is not the issue but her ungratefulness that has translated into soiling the reputation of the Good Samaritan as spoken at length about is what bothers me.
She will not succeed in her evil enterprise, for that I can assure her because God is in control and the battle is the Lord’s.
Who then is a Jezebel, some people may want to know?
Jezebel is “(Old Testament) the wife of Ahab, king of Israel: she fostered the worship of Baal and tried to destroy the prophets of Israel (I Kings 18:4–13); she was killed by Jehu (II Kings 9:29–37)
2. (Sometimes not capital) a shameless or scheming woman
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