Should I have done that?

I was making my hair in a salon on a fateful day and I had some bars of chocolate with me. I took them along because I knew that I was going to stay long at the salon and I did not have time to eat before going there. After about two hours in the salon, I started munching on the chocolates but I felt selfish because I did not offer anyone, not even the hairdresser’s daughter who was about six years old. I felt like calling the girl to me but I did not know how her parents (both mother and father were present) will react.

I stopped eating them for a while and the girl later came to stand by me, just to see what her mother was doing to my hair. Instinctively, I brought out one bar of chocolate and gave the girl, she collected it and said ‘thank you’, and then she left to meet her dad. I don’t know what she did to the bar I gave her, I want to believe that she handed it to her dad or kept it somewhere to eat later. Immediately after, I asked myself why I gave it to her because I know for a fact that parents always warn their children not to collect anything from strangers. Also, in Africa where the belief in witchcraft is so strong, they could believe that there’s a possibility that I could use the chocolates to initiate their daughter into ‘my’ coven. After all these thoughts passed through my mind, I really wished I did not give it to her but the deed was already done.

Just to mention, all the while when I was making my hair, the woman was begging all the familiar passersby for her sallah gift, because it was a celebration day for the Muslims (they had just ended their 40 day fast). Even when her husband came, she kept asking people for her sallah gift unashamedly, I could count her doing this for about 15 times. This made me to understand that the woman liked collecting things (food, money, etc) from people. So I thought to myself again, ‘if the woman likes collecting things from random people, then she won’t mind me handing her daughter a bar of chocolate’. It was just a point of consolation for me.