My teacher ate my lunch

Okay, not in a greedy or manipulative way. She actually helped me.

When I was younger, up until a few years ago , I hated seeing onions in my food. Unlike my mama, who loves to see it as much as she loves to eat it, I try to eat onions when they are blended or raw and thinly sliced with Nigerian suya. You'll get this if you are like me. If my onions are not in suya or blended into the food, you will see me pick them out or set them aside on my plate.

Photo source: BBC 

Let's go to the main gist. I was four or so in nursery school and always picked out the onions from my food bowl. I got home most days tired in the afternoon, forgetting the separation techniques I had performed in school, but my mum's scream and whip would help me remember in a flash.

This always happened, some days I was asked to eat the already cold onions. Oh, I hated onions so much more, so eating the picked-out cold ones was unfair and gross to my young mind.

On one fateful day in class, my teacher saw me crying as the onion portion in my plates had miraculously doubled, making it even harder to perform my well-known technique.

With a heart(stomach) full of love(hunger), she offered to help me eat my food. I knew what this meant if I had no capri-sonne, which I mostly never had. I wouldn't have anything for lunch, but at this point, I had to make a choice of either eating cold onions, which sometimes had a good portion of the food after being whipped or having an empty clear plate with nothing to eat and no whipping after school. I choose the latter, and as they say, the rest is history.

My mum is a caterer, and my teacher must have had a good serving of La Miam food. However, I didn't care that my well-prepared lunch was going for nothing. I was happy she helped me with my food, as my mum would see an empty plate and be glad I ate all of my food and the onion.

Thank you, teacher, wherever you are. I don't know how I survived my 2 to 3 years in that school without lunch on days when I had onion-filled food. God must have pumped my stomach up by some sort of miracle.

Originally published on 1/16/2020 at 4:15 PM.