Vala, Pennywell Rd

“Man, this is a mystery. It’s a mystery to me. I can’t explain it. I’m just so happy to be alive and to be able to say it.

I was dead. But there is something I saw.

In Africa the electricity is not like here. There are many poles with many, many wires going all over the place. And some carry a lot of electricity.

I was walking home in my village in Africa. I was walking towards an area of water on the road, but I didn’t see that one of the high electricity cables had fallen and was lying under the water. I went to walk through the water, and I was immediately electrocuted. I just fell straight down onto my knees.

If you ask me, ‘How does it feel being electrocuted?’ I can say, it is a very bad feeling. Just imagine a lion eating you alive. It was like it was tearing pieces out of my body. But I couldn’t move. There was nobody else there because it was raining so much. And my vision was growing dim, dim, dim … until everything went black and I could see nothing. Nothing.

That was when I knew I was dying or dead. But then I saw someone. Somebody came. In that darkness I saw a man. He said to me - man, I’ll never forget this - he said to me, ‘Your time has not come. You have to go back. You have work still to do.’ I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to die. I saw a gate in front of me, and I knew that if I went through that gate that I couldn’t go back again. But then I felt something like a huge wind pushing me. Later, when somebody found me, I had bad burns but somehow I wasn’t in the water any more.

I’ve never told anybody outside my family this, but you asked the question, ‘What is your happiest memory?’ so this is it, and I’ll never forget it.”