Explain what the text says explicitly. Reread paragraph 2 of “Civil Peace.” What does this paragraph reveal about Jonathan and his family’s circumstances? Cite textual evidence to support your response.
Jonathan Iwegbu has survived the Nigerian Civil War along with his wife and three of his four children, and thus considers himself “extraordinarily lucky”. He also treasures his still-working bicycle, which he buried during the war to ensure it would not be stolen. Another apparent miracle is his still-standing home, which he repairs and reoccupies after returning home to the capital city of Enugu. To explain both his good and bad fortune to himself and others, he often repeats a phrase: “Nothing puzzles God.”
The bicycle had a little history of its own. One day at the height of the war it was commandeered 'for urgent military action'. Hard as its loss would have been to him he would still have let it go without a thought had he not had some doubts about the genuineness of the officer. It wasn't his disreputable rags, nor the toes peeping out of one blue and one brown canvas shoes, nor yet the two stars of his rank done obviously in a hurry in biro, that troubled Jonathan; many good and heroic soldiers looked the same or worse. It was rather a certain lack of grip and firmness in his manner. So Jonathan, suspecting he might be amenable to influence, rummaged in his raffia bag and produced the two pounds with which he had been going to buy firewood which his wife, Maria, retailed to camp officials for extra stock-fish and corn meal, and got his bicycle back. That night he buried it in the little clearing in the bush where the dead of the camp,
including his own youngest son, were buried. When he dug it up again a year later after the surrender all it needed was a little palm-oil greasing. 'Nothing puzzles God,' he said in wonder.
Civil Peace
what evidence supports that Jonathan looked at his family as a treasure
