Adanna Lezie is another widow from Abia State, a South-Eastern state of Nigeria. She is a 30 year old widow with three children in tow. She also married as a teenager but nevertheless, she was very much in love with her husband. Her oldest child is eleven and the youngest, is four years old.
Her husband’s death was possibly the most traumatic and harrowing experience of her young life; although she admits that she had four children and lost one before she lost her husband. Both experiences left her with haunted eyes darkened with shadows of pain and sorrow. He had fallen ill with cholera. Before she could catch her breath, he was dead, leaving her bereft and alone at a very young age ¾ she had been twenty-seven when he died.
At a mere thirty years of age, Adanna has aged at least five more years due to hardship and worries and a rather difficult lifestyle. Hawking bananas around the streets of Abuja is the vocation she is currently engaged in and she admitted that it definitely was not an easy lifestyle especially given the unforgiving harshness of the sun as well as the rough driving most motorists on Abuja streets seem to enjoy. Adanna is aware of the stark reality that she is both mother and father to her kids, and losing her would be the final blow to their childhood. But she salves her conscience about the risks involved in hawking on busy streets by reminding herself that the purpose of hawking in the first place, is to cater for her children.
Adanna’s situation was recently made even more urgent when she found herself unable to scare up enough funds to pay off her rent. She had to vacate the premises and started ‘squatting’ in a crude wooden shed by the side of the road with her three kids; exposed to the elements and all sorts of danger. Of course she had also lost count of how many times her children had been chased home from school because she had been unable to meet up with payments for their school fees.
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