How I Met Mr Simeon Nnah and His Family

~ Oke gbanaha nwata, ya akpoo ya oke nsi

~ Ufefe/Ikuku fee/kuo, a hu ike okuko

I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about something that has been a source of worry to me in the last several years, since 2011. I believe that if my side of the story is heard, it mightn't change a thing about your opinion about me, my stance against the Church of Latter-day Saints and her members and representatives but it buttresses my belief in hearing from the other side too. Although what happened in Vegas should have remained in Vegas, I've found it imperative to say these things in the open here on Blogger, to set the record straight so to speak. In 2007, I returned from serving an LDS Church mission to the USA, having finished my service in Houston, Texas and Salt Lake City, Utah. It's an interesting experience, a costly decision that has set me behind many years of my life and hard work.At this time, I had no contact with the antagonist of this post, Mr Simeon Nnah, who was to become a benefactor of mine later that year. Recently, he has become a source of pain, shame and evil in more ways than one. Read on, please. Such lack of respect, consideration and understanding should be seen among people who want to be emulated, except of course Jesus Christ who was crucified among thieves has allowed us to follow his footsteps - that is become thieves. Why then brag about being full of integrity? Why change your promise? Why the paranoia? Why become a bully? Why? Where are my books, Mr Nnah?

At my return from Utah in early July, 2007 I made the decision to go home to Aba, Abia State where I had my family. I had left for the mission from Ibadan, Oyo State a few months after completing my National Youth Service Corps programme in 2005. The LDS Church mission has an 18 month experience started in late November, 2005. It was my first trip outside Nigeria and to the United States of America to the best of my knowledge. It wasn't a new thought to have as most LDS children are encouraged from their childhood to prepare to do a mission, this encouragement mostly reserved for the boys who would do so at the age of 19. The age of participation for women who were interested in fulfilling that church obligation was 21. I was past the official or usual age of participation but I yielded to pressure just before my NYSC ended and filled out a form. I was in a relationship or so I thought with an officer from my place of primary assignment but we ended the relationship before I left for the USA. Our separation was bitter. In fact, he was the most impossible human being on earth. All my sacrifices for the relationship were considered rude or he was interested in every woman on earth. In Africa, men are hardly shamed for their promiscuity. Anyway, it was a done deal and I was out of Ibadan, my locale.

When I submitted my form and after an interview with the District President, a white man, I was asked to serve in the USA on Temple Square, to be precise. Before the decision to serve, I had confided in a man, another Igbo I had met in Lagos during one of my visits to family there. I told him the personal issues I was having in my life including the pressures I was having to serve a mission. The man, the leader of the Okokomaiko area of the church, called a bishop, in LDS Church lingo encouraged me to heed my feelings and fill out a form. I returned to Ibadan and spoke to the leader of the place I worshipped and he too supported the decision. So, while all these were transpiring, I had no prior knowledge of the Nnah family, the head nor the tail. I was going to do my mission and that was that. My return in 2007 was met with trepidation. Firstly, I didn't approve of our living arrangement, which I left behind in 2005. I travelled to Port Harcourt in search of employment but I couldn't find any at the time. I was in Calabar too but not for business or work. I had accompanied an old friend on his work trip and we had time to chat while being driven to the old city. There was no job in Aba for me to do too. My mother felt that I should look into the opportunities I could have in the USA. So, I did. I wish I had at least gone to visit Ibadan that year. But I was really unhappy with the outcome of my mission. Temple Square was a visitor's centre, not the ideal mission that I anticipated even though the lure of the US experience was great. I worked along women from over 40 countries and tried out signature world cuisines.

I had applied to the University of Massachusetts Boston for a course/programme in Human Services before leaving Temple Square in 2007. I didn't know much about the educational processes of the USA prior to my application even though I often got sent application brochures from the US before and during my education at the University of Ibadan. Upon my return to Nigeria after the Mormon mission, I sought other affordable educational opportunities in the USA and found the WPPP. I got telephone interviewed in Nigeria, Ogbor Hill to be precise and got offered an admission to the programme. This was in August, 2007. While I was still at Aba, I went to the village to felicitate with an acquaintance or distant relative of my mother's who came to visit family from Maryland, USA. I stayed the first week of my return from Nigeria in his LeonardTown home.While at Aba, I had made contact with UMass Boston Housing and somebody there replied my email telling me the housing options available to students especially international students. I discovered that she like me was Igbo. Ms. Onyinye Malo introduced me to her elder sister Ifeoma (Ify) Malo who was also a student of that University. I would later discover that duo were also University of Ibadan alumni. What a coincidence.

My interaction with the elder sister brought me to Boston and UMass Boston on a dicey housing arrangement with one of her male friends, one Isaac Isiwele. I would meet Ms Ifeoma Okafor (Onaga) in Mr Isiwele's house that Sunday afternoon or a week or so later and that made me feel at home. I went to school from that house until I met with Mr Peter Obijiaku at the Campus Centre, a Nigerian and a colleague of Mrs Nnah's whom I was yet to meet. I had recognized Peter as a fellow Nigerian by picking up his accent, a thing Nigerians didn't quite appreciate from each other or other Africans in the Diaspora. But I was going to talk to somebody about my housing situation, being worried about the long distance to school and the fact that I would be sharing an apartment with two kind but strange male Nigerians both of them Esan (from Edo State). Mr Obijiaku introduced me to the Nnahs because I was Ngwa and Latter-day Saint (LDS), like Mrs Nnah's husband. I hadn't known the Nnah family prior to meeting Mr Obijiaku who was a nurse as Mrs Nnah with a local Boston hospital. Mr Nnah was in Nigeria at our first call to their home in Needham, Massachusetts one Sunday morning. Mrs Nnah assured me that she would be in touch upon her husband's return from his trip to Africa. I was already about a month in the United States, this being the latter part of 2007 (September-October) and never lived with Mr Peter Obijiaku.

When Mr Nnah returned, he came in company of his wife Mrs Mabel Nnah to to Dorchester, where I stayed on Baird Street and asked me to follow them to their house, one fateful evening. I bade farewell to me host and went to live in Needham. I went to UMass Boston from Needham and it was really quite an ordeal. I didn't realize that the city's extensive bus services didn't extend to the suburbs. Ukpabi ukpabi. All my classes at UMass began at 6:00pm and ended at 8:30pm. Hence, it was a difficult task catching the commuter rail from South Station tp Needham Heights before 9:00pm. Sometime I returned to Needham at 10:30pm, often asking Mr Nnah to give me a ride from the train station to his house, which though a walking distance was scary to do at night. This didn't go down well with him, understandably. I decided that I would move back to the city eventually. First, I needed to secure my stay at school.