Why would you try taking the risk?

The incessant vibration of the phone had me abandoning the one-sided football match between Liverpool and Manchester United recently. Liverpool had already put three past the hapless 19-time Premier League champions and there was no reason to continue with the torment. 

So, I stepped out to read the 212 WhatsApp messages from one of my Lugambo groups. The eight participants had been at it for about 30 minutes. The day’s topic was a mutual friend who had recently exited the group, citing family issues. Once in a while I had checked on him but he was never willing to divulge what the issue was. 
In the WhatsApp discussions, some said it was his precarious state of finances that hadbegun bothering him. Others speculated that he had contracted some incurable disease so he wanted to spend his last days as a loner.

But then someone who ‘knows’ him in and out broke the sad news. He had recently fathered his seventh child with a woman he did not even like. 
Our friend, Salim, had told our lugambo-spilling friend that the said woman had led him into temptation. 
She had allegedly bankrolled his extravagant lifestyle, before seducing him on a trip she planned to Murchison Falls National Park where she asked him to leave the mother of his six children.  
This was after she had posted several pictures of them in compromising positions on social media. This had been largely picked up and shared elsewhere, including on our forum.

Foolishly, Salim, says he took the risk and jumped at the opportunity like a smitten adolescent.
 But four nights in, he realised he had made the kind of mistake his forefathers never prepared him for. He wanted out because he woke up every morning wondering about when all this would end.
Unfortunately, he was already in the deep end of it all. Salim, like many of us, jumped into the pool with both feet. The allure of trips and exotic dining as well as paid for Uber rides had blinded him that he barely thought straight. 
Now he had started dreaming about what ‘life felt like’ again or what it was he was really getting out of this new relationship. 

Before long,  we were discussing how to help him ditch the other woman and return home; after all, what are friends for if they are not talking about you behind your back, especially when you are in trouble? A committee was formed with me heading it.   
We were supposed to convince the new woman that ‘If anyone cared about anyone , in this case Salim, they will want the best for them. If she treats him badly, like he claimed,  there was no need for him to stay.’ 
The only challenge was how he would get back to Hajara,  the woman he had left or whether she was willing to take him back. 

But then, she opened up her house for him again.  After all, she said ‘just because she had been hurt , it did not mean he would do the same again.  Or maybe not. 
This was a risk she was going to risk taking again after all, she had never stopped loving him. 
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