How Candle Light Nearly Set Lady’s Head On Fire

It was similar to the experience of late King of Pop Michael ‘whacko’ Jackson when he lost his hair to a freak fire accident during the shooting of an ad for Pepsi. This time, it was a candle light fire that gutted the hair of young Jovita right inside her apartment in Abuja recently. 

The pride of every woman is her hair. And even when some women find themselves in short supply of natural hair, they find recourse to artificial hair which they attach to the natural hair or wear as wig. Even so, the women still pride their hair as the crown of their beauty.
When a woman’s hair is threatened by anybody or thing, the woman does not take it lightly. So it was when penultimate Wednesday, fire from a candle light, caught the hair of Miss Jovita, a security officer with a private firm. She thought all hell had been let loose on hair. But for her quick reaction and timely intervention, Jovita would not only have lost her entire hair but perhaps, would have lost her life.

She told LEADERSHIP in a chat that the whole near tragic incident was no thanks to the Power
Holding Company of Nigeria, PHCN, formerly derided as Never Expect Power Anymore, NEPA. According to Jovita, who said she has not found mouth to thank her God for the deliverance, she would have had nothing to do with candle stick if PHCN had supplied electric power steadily. 

“It was on a Wednesday evening penultimate week, when I came back from work. I wasn’t having light on that very day and the lamp holder in the room was bad where I charge my rechargeable lantern. After then, I went to a shop nearby, and I bought a stick of candle. I lit it and then I went to the kitchen. After using the light to check what was in the pot, I came back to the room and dropped this candle light on top of a refrigerator. Bending down to pick up something I kept inside a plate, like groundnut, I was packing from inside the plate, forgetting that there was this candle light I kept on the fridge. As I raised my head the fire from the candle caught my head. I heard the sound,” Jovita narrated.

She told how her instinct forced her to run straight to the kitchen where she could find water. “Immediately I noticed the fire, I ran into the kitchen.  I was  hitting my hair and trying to help myself by using my hands to quench the fire but I noticed that the more I moved my body the higher the fire grew on my hair. The head-tie I used in tying my hair at the back burnt and got squeezed and because the hair style I was using was dreadlocks and that was the third day I made the hair. The dreadlock got burnt and squeezed on my hair.

“The only thing that prevented the fire from getting to my own natural hair was that my natural hair was fixed with an attachment before using the dread on it again. So there were two attachments that were covering my hair. That is why I still have some hair. So, as you can see now, the fire burnt the front hair and it was actually looking very bad but I thank God now it has gone. The signs of the burn are clearing

 “Thank God, I was not having water when I went to work that morning but in the evening when I came back, I was actually thinking, did I buy water? I just ran to the kitchen in the belief that there would be water. I opened the water tank and saw a white bowl with water and that gave me hope. I just fixed my whole head into the water and that was how the fire went off from me.

“I screamed and called my neighbours to help me thank God. You know, immediately the fire caught my hair, the candle light went off and because it went off, I realized the amount of fire that was on my hair because the fire was able to light up the whole room. The room was very bright and my neigbours were thinking whether it was the house that was burning. So, because of the rate of the light the fire gave, my neigbours knew what I went through,” Jovita recalled.

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