All in a day's job!

And so it happened that this morning, I set upon to do some hard labour, yes, me. I had not planned to, but yesterday as I entered into my mother's compound, there were several mounds of sand, each constituting a trip, standing forlornly in a scattered row. The matter was simple; the sand was not going to stay there forever, it had to be spread. And naturally, mother was happy to have me home.
For the benefit of the 'uneducated', a trip of sand is essentially a big tipper lorry-load of sand/dirt/soil. In this case, the sand was of the laterite variety, the kind used to fill low/marshy lands and that which is found naturally in Edo state.
Long ago, as the myths read, the cause of the reddish nature of the (laterite) soil found in the Benin kingdom was due to the blood of several giants who had been slain by the ancient Obas when the land was claimed by the Bini people. Blood of giants or not, this morning as I stared at the mounds of sand and the shovels sticking out of them, I knew they had to be spread. The method was simple, (shovel up the dirt, spread it anywhere you see), the task however would not be.
One of my older cousins was around(bless his soul!) and the man is built like an ox's elder brother. Already, before I had even stood from bed, he had demolished a mound and was bent over, powerfully attacking another. Grabbing a shovel, I stepped forward like some Roman general about to attack Carthage and dived on the closest mound. It took only fifteen minutes.
Now, I want to explain something here. Broad-shouldered, quite handsome and (ehm..) 'not short' I may be, I'm not exactly of the Ox variety. So one cannot expect me to demolish a mound all by myself! So fifteen minutes after I started, I stopped. Don't judge! I had blisters for pete's sake!
Now, my fingers and palm are built for writing and drawing with steel-nibbed pens, typing on keypads and caressing the finer lines of beautiful women (another days story!), not for holding shovels!!! All in all, I had to then get some bandage and wrap my hands before continuing work. Yes, I did!
The work continued beautifully, then, one of the tenants who owns an electronic repairs store came over with a couple of his guys. Maybe they thought it was easy work, the way they saw me shoveling heap after heap of sand in perfect see-saw motion, all muscle-rippling and all that(yezzbozz!). In their minds, they were like, "See beans!"(Mscheeew..)Ok, I'm just being ungrateful. At any rate they joined in, and work moved faster. Then one other guy came over and stood by us and began pouring wisdom.
At first no one listened while the guy gave us the latest in Edo politics, it was when he started giving advice on how a combination of coconut sap and lime juice can cure HIV/AIDS and how years ago, he once used just white sand with no cement to build a skyscraper! that we really started laughing. In the end, the work finished on time and we ordered for five more trips.
As I sat on the sand later on, typing this and wondering if I'll ever lose these callouses and blisters, I marvelled to myself; this is what men even younger than me do as half a days job. A feat, or ordeal (lol), that had nearly killed me, was food to another man's table. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I thanked my stars and counted my blessings.
Now I'm rested, and there's a mound of..eba! before me, All in a day's job!