Pressure from all sides

_{Photo by Alice Pasqual}

Earlier this year when a friend of mine had returned from the village where he went to spend the holidays, he had told stories of the different places his brothers (not exactly related by blood) had told him they went to in search of wealth and how much they had spent paying spiritualist and all manner of people to do all sort of diabolical things just so that they could get rich.

From the way my friend was telling the stories, I could tell that there wasn't any disgust in his voice, rather he said it in a kind of way that just felt like him telling me that doing things like that was no longer seen as working with the devil but was instead now a normal thing. Immediately I had told him how bad his brothers actions were and how the devil never gives anyone anything for free.

"We're still very young and have our whole life in front of us and what that means is that there's a lot of time and a lot of opportunities for us out there" I had said to him, trying to motivate and encourage him to stay on the right path before jokingly telling him to stay far away from me if he ever decides to go down that road.

Well, fast forward to three weeks later and that same friend of mine had received a call from his siblings, telling him that his dad had been arrested that morning by the police and they were demanding some amount of money to release him.

But before I go any further, I would like to put it out there that this guy at his young age has been the one seeing himself through school with little or no support from his family, not because they don't want to help him but because they simply don't have. And I know that because he tells me everything, which is the reason why I always try to help anytime I could. Sometimes I lend him some money and sometimes I give it to him and ask him not to pay back, depending on how much I have.

And lately, the whole bills has been weighing on him, especially the house rent because we were recently asked to make a deposit this Sunday or leave the hostel, luckily for him we both were able to combine a little bit of what we both had to make his deposit today (I already made mine earlier).

Anyways the whole thing was weighing on him and then the call came in about his dad getting arrested and needing money for bail. It was as if everything was happening all at once and it was all against him, and that was why when he uploaded a new status, talking about how he really doesn't want to go to the dark side but is being pushed to, I immediately knew he was talking about his brothers and the black magic stuff.

That whole thing got me scared for a minute and was actually why I had to try extra hard to help him get the money for rent because it was obvious that he was starting to consider what his brothers had told him.

Luckily for him, his dad was released the next day and we both had laughed about it because we had joked about him not being able to pay the bail so they released him because they were tired of feeding him for free.

Anyways, this whole thing just tells us why it's never a good idea to think or let people tell us about these kind of things in the first place, because the moment we feel pressured, we begin to look at those thing as an option, a way out when actually, it's a way into a much more bigger problem.