PUNCH
Agatha Tuotamuno was not born deaf. One Saturday in 1986, two days after her sixth birthday, she felt a tingling sensation in her ear that made her uncomfortable.
According to her, it was as though there were tiny stones in her ears and she shook her head tirelessly in an attempt to get it out.
“I didn’t tell anyone because I lived with my stepmother then. My mother left me and my siblings when I was barely three years old and my father married another woman almost immediately.
“So, when the sensation in my ear began, I didn’t pay much attention since I felt no pain and it didn’t affect my hearing,” she said in an interview with Sunday PUNCH.
However, after a few weeks without remedy, things got worse. Agatha began to hear a long, unending sound that crescendoed mostly at night when everywhere was quiet.
At that point, the ear had also begun to produce puss-like liquid mixed with blood and was accompanied by a gnawing pain.
“I remember that day like it was yesterday when I put my fingers in my ears in an attempt to silence the noise and saw blood. I ran to my stepmother since my dad was at work. He used to work with an oil firm that operated offshore.
“My stepmother just gave me some paracetamol tablets and told me to tell her what I put in my ears. I explained to her that it just happened and she started hitting me.
“She called me all sorts of names and asked me to tell her what coven I was in. Before my dad could return, I was taken to a church where I was tied and asked to confess,” she added.
When her father, Gregory Tuotamuno, returned home days after, the situation had worsened.
She said she was dragged from church to church with promises of her getting better from age six till she turned 10.
At that point, Agatha had become completely deaf in both ears. Her dad also took ill and joined her in search of solutions from one prayer house to another.
She added, “There was no place we (my dad and I) did not go. We spent thousands of naira. We paid N20,000 for some liquid and another N25,000 for prayer. The value of N10,000 at that time should be equivalent to N200,000 now. So, it was a lot of money.
“We paid a pastor and their team to fast for us and we were still forced to pay another money for deliverance.
“One of the pastors took me to the river and stripped me naked. He fetched water from the river and poured it inside my ears. He said he was rinsing my ear from the evil forces. With different pastors came different prophecies.
“One told me it (deafness) was from my biological mother’s side and that I needed cleansing. He didn’t even know my mother had died because he was asking that we bring her for deliverance, too, until we told him that she died when I was way younger.
“The other one said it was from my father’s elder sister. My father has only one brother. He doesn’t have a sister. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the prophecies but my parents believed so much in them.”
But it did not stop there. At age 16, after her father’s death, Agatha said her stepmother got a wave of a popular preacher visiting Port Harcourt, Rivers State, for the first time from South Africa where the ministry was based. She was asked to attend the cleric’s event.
She said after spending so much on transport from Omoku, which is about an hour to Port Harcourt, they had to lodge themselves in an expensive hotel where the pastor was said to be lodged as well.
“We just wanted to see this man. We wanted to touch him and receive our miracle. I remember very well how my stepmother gave all the money in her savings then. She was still working at the Ministry of Education, had worked for more than 20 years, and was due for retirement soon, but she wanted me to be healed.
“She gave all her money when the man mentioned my case and she was expecting a miracle which never happened.
