She was just seventeen — sharp eyes, quick smile, and a head full of equations. Urenna.
A second-year Electrical Engineering student at FUT Owerri.
That Friday evening, she left school to visit her grandmother in Egbu — a short trip, just a few miles and a hug away. But life, as always, was waiting in the shadows.
By nightfall, she was burning up. Fever. Then the mumbling began. Strange words, incoherent thoughts. The old woman panicked — not for lack of love, but for lack of understanding. She believed it was spiritual attack. The kind of thing that makes neighbours whisper and pastors rub their palms together.
So, instead of a hospital, they took her to church.
Candles lit, prayers rose, drums thundered — as the fever burned through the girl’s brain.
By the time her father — my childhood friend — got wind of it, he was roaring down the road, cursing, pleading, praying all at once. But science had already lost to superstition.
Cerebral malaria. That’s what the doctor said, when there was no more pulse to check.
Urenna was gone.
She didn’t die because help was far away. She died because a society that prays for heaven keeps forgetting how to save life on earth.
We are drowning in religion, yet starving for wisdom.
And on nights like this, I wonder — how many more bright candles must go out before we learn that God also works through knowledge?
RIP, Urenna.
A flower plucked too soon.
