Care is a Doing Word

I am a bit of a night owl. Earlier this week, I think it was Tuesday, just around midnight, a dog in a neighbouring compound began to whine and whimper. The sound was sharp, continuous, and painful. It went on into the early hours of the morning and was still there when the rest of the house woke up.

I drew my husband’s attention to it. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t imagining distress. We agreed it sounded like something was wrong… and then we moved on with our day.

But the whining didn’t stop. It went on throughout the day, and we adjusted to it. You know how you enter a room and smell something awful at first, but after a while, you stop noticing it? That’s what happened. The sound was still there, but we grew used to it.

Later that day, my younger sister mentioned it. She had also heard it all day and was worried. We shared concern again, and again, we moved on.

The next morning, day two, the whining continued, and finally, something struck me – we were all acting wrongly. Not cruelly, but wrongly.

In almost 48 hours, none of us had walked across the street, knocked on the gate, and asked a simple question, “Hi, we’ve been hearing the dog, is everything alright?”

We talked about it. We worried about it. We hoped it was nothing serious. But all these are not ‘care’.

To care is to act, even if it’s just a knock on a gate or a whispered, “Can I help?”

We didn’t mean to be indifferent. But phrases like “mind the business that pays you,” “it’s not my dog,” “we don’t even know them” are subtle defaults, a subconscious wiring that dulls our urgency to respond when the pain is not our own.

I watched She Said on Netflix. It tells the story of two women journalists who went beyond their job descriptions, past the fear and risks, to uncover years of workplace abuse, buried by power, money and fame. Their work helped ignite a global reckoning – #metoo. As emotionally packed as the movie was, seeing as it was based on true events, what felt the most painful for me were the work colleagues, the management, the board – people who saw but looked the other way, not because they approved of what they saw, but perhaps because random people weren’t worth the trouble of care.

Decades later, these two women cared enough to act. Because they knew the world needed to change. The workplace needed to be safer for their daughters, and all daughters.

We admire people like that. But when we’re given the smallest chance to show up, we often shrink back, absorbed in our own little worlds.

I’m not even talking about carrying placards through Nigerian streets — we all know that feels like a kind of suicide. I’m talking about what’s right next to you: that sad-looking child who always lingers by the tree outside on your street, or that colleague who’s being bullied, and everybody knows.

Have you ever paused to ask, “Hi… are you okay?” “Can I help?” “Is anyone seeing this?”

SA eventually went to check. We don’t know what the dog went through, but we know it’s okay now. And someone in that compound is aware.

Imagine you were the one in need, not for money, but for someone, a random person, to notice, to ask, to knock. Would you trust that someone will, if everyone were like you?

Someone must care enough to act, and sometimes, that someone… is meant to be you.

Seriously.