One thing these past few days have taught me is to exclaim like Tyla. (I gave up on the dancing and mesmerizing twerking immediately I started learningš). Be that as it may, let me get out my first Yoh because the week I am having is going to drive me to insomnia.
I woke up on Tuesday morning and decided that I have to be the one to break the curse of perpetual brokeness in my family. I only had to scratch my head for a minute to remember that I had joined Upwork some time in 2020 but I had quickly given up because I had yet to experience a critical level of being broke.
I quickly logged in and to my surprise, I found that Upwork had been depositing free Connects to my account every month and they had accumulated to the grand sum of 105. I was so happy and in my state of glee, I started behaving like a blind lumberjack and started felling my great trees of Connects by applying to all jobs that seemed doable without any strategy whatsoever.
By Thursday, it was clear that I was not going to get any jobs and a tiny sensible part of my brain that my system unsurprisingly keeps safely tucked away at the back of my head, told me that I should actually have a strategy. Fortunately, I saw the light and I hurriedly went to the YouTube University where I got some useful insight.
After burning the midnight oil on Friday night diligently noting down all the useful tips and tricks, I quickly realized that because of my poor planning, I had actually wasted my second chance at Upwork.
The first challenge that I was facing was that I had no laptop so there was no way I could bring my profile information to 100% because including the projects segment requires a desktop or tablet. The desktop was required also to optimize job search through Zapier which is just terribly inconvenient when done by phone.
Two, I had wasted my Connects and I only had 30 remaining which did not do much for me as I kept refreshing hoping that I would come across a job requiring less Connects so that I may apply to at least two or three but that was futile.
Nevertheless, I heard from someone wise that third time is the charm so let me relax my third world self till I get 45 dollars to buy myself a new lifeline.
If you read my introductory post, you know that I grew up in the village. Now, you must understand that when living upcountry, one does not wake up to the incessant noise of traffic but rather to the melodies of birds and if lucky, to the hum of your mother gossiping away in the kitchen with one of her friends who pretended that she wanted to borrow tea leaves when really she just wanted the tea and the ‘tea’.
You may want to stay in bed a little longer because if you were to join them in the kitchen, they would just subtly change the topic and try to act as if they were not assassinating their mutual friend’s character. If you choose to eavesdrop, then you may grow to be a gossiper or be a dedicated gossip listener. Either way, you will have an affiliation to gossip to some extent and lucky for me, I have became a gossiper and a dedicated gossip listener.
Anyways, with this introduction, let me now indict you dear reader to my circle of gossip and today’s piece is rather sad than entertaining. Now, as I tell you this story (gossipš«£), I want you to keep in mind that nothing really ever happens in the village except marriages, funerals, circumcision ceremonies and stoning of pedophiles and child molesters.
The story played out like this. The year is when I am a teenager. The ‘tea’ climate had been really dry that I thought that maybe, just maybe, the women cooled their tongues but boy was I wrong because I hadn’t taken into account that I had been tucked away in boarding school for three months. Three months that had seen a story unfold to the point where its news had been thoroughly recycled that it was now considered an old story that had already gone with the wind.
I only uncovered it when I noticed that one of the girls who was a regular at the river where we fetched water had been missing in action for several days. I didn’t think anything of it at first until I noticed that the girl’s mother was also MIA. My gossip antenna immediately sensed that there was something to know and I subtly went about my mission be in the loop.
It would have been easy to just assume that she had been married (the girl, because here girls enter marriages as easily as if they were walking into a market) but that wouldn’t explain why the mother was away too.
So one day as I was adjusting my Jerry can on my head, I ask the girl in front of me,
” Hey, by the way, where is ‘Jane Doe’? I haven’t seen her since I came home for the holidays.”
The girl laughs hysterically that I am alarmed for a second that I broke her. After she calms down, she looks at me incredulously and asks,
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?” I ask my intrigue almost forming a waterfall out of my mouth.
“That she was constantly abused by a very close relative.” (I know the relative. I’m just trying to censor a little bit)
I gasp in clear disbelief because that is not something I expected at all.
“And the mother knew for a long time until she could not take it anymore,” she continues.
At this point I am ready to put my Jerry can down because its weight that was previously too light to be felt, starts crashing my neck in. My mind starts to work in giga Hertz trying to reconcile this information with my observations but despite the one time I had asked myself why the girl had suddenly started dressing up despite being too young, nothing comes to mind. (Understand that in the village, dressing up is not expected from someone whose puberty has not properly hit.)
Later, I learnt that the mother left with her daughter never to come back and the community had slowly learned the truth after a while. Knowing village justice, I wondered why nothing had happened to the man. I suddenly found myself with too many questions most of which I have no answers till today and one thing I do wonder about is if the girl started dressing up because she decided that she might as well look good if her life was going to be one long nightmare.
A question that has also never left my mind is why the women decided not to do something after learning the truth even if it was screaming and raising chaos as they did that one time or maybe even get him arrested.
If you’re wondering why I would expect the women to react this way, it is because that is how they raised us. They raised us in a manner that shows that they are ready to defend order in the society and they did on multiple occasions. I am just surprised that they let this occasion slide. Over the years, I had been surrounded by iron fisted women and till today I am surprised they chose the highway of meekness.
That in a room of a thousand prying eyes, only yours could undress me, That in a sea of roaming hands, only yours could explore the intricacies of my body, That in a world ablaze with desire and lust, only yours could ignite mine, Surely was a privilege you took for granted
That I never saw the faltering of the purity of your smile, That in my drunken love haze I failed to notice your embrace turn cold, That my tear stains went unnoticed by you even when we were entangled in the most intimate manner, Surely was a lapse of judgement I mistook for love
I was born a little over twenty years ago. Three or four days later, my parents whisked me away from the hospital so I could begin forging my way in a tiny little village in the Highlands. The tiny little village has proven to be not so tiny because like all other habitable places, it has people. And where there are people, there tends to be something dark and sinister that brews dangerously fast to give rise to a very pregnant storm that thoroughly disrupts the very core of the community.
Anyways, as days slowly morphed into each other, I grew and lo and behold I started walking. The walking turned into running and soon I was running to school because my green monster could not comprehend why I had to remain at home when my siblings were away the whole day. I was relatively too young to be in school considering it was not a day care but we all know African parents have never needed a guidebook; they just wing it as it comes.
In school, I learnt my second and third languages but I cannot visibly hide my shudder when I remember how they were wonderfully spiced up with my mother tongue in those early days. Here, my story truly began because with the knowledge of new languages, came the profound awareness that life was bigger than my village. This awareness was further reinstated when my parents started telling us stories about a type of success so big, that mandated that someone had to travel to the far away America and thus my American dream was forged.
Now, I was lucky that to me, the American dream seemed a huge possibility because the universe (or my parents’ genes) blessed me intellectually. My mind became attuned to the fact that my academic success would see me jet into America and be the scholar the universe meant for me. That has not happened. (Just to clarify, it is not because I suddenly became dumb.)
Some may see this as a sad situation, because it is, but for me I see it as a failure of the African dream. The African dream that I never knew I harboured until my American dream failed and I found myself yearning for more just to be left utterly stranded like a drowning woman clutching at a straw. The yearning was so bad that till today, I still feel hungover by its constant presence in my soul.
“What is the African dream”, you ask.Ā Well, let me detail it out for you. The African dream is to create and through creation, live. After a thorough education system that just about brought me to the brink of a permanent burn out, I found myself wanting to go out of its confines and do something that it exclusively avoided; create. Years and years of memorising tons of education material that did not inspire me as was intended, left me aching to create something that would bring me fulfilment.
I tried engaging in an event that required public speaking but I had a very bad case of anxiety that my nerves got the best of me. How I got anxiety is another story considering I grew up in a village for goodness’s sake.
After that I tried getting into hobbies such as crocheting but I quickly found out I did not have the financial capability to support them over a long period of time. By this time, I had already joined university and I could not bring myself to juggle academic stress and the constant struggle to create.
All this is to show that my interpretation of the failed African dream is that there are not enough opportunities to indulge the creativity lurking beneath the spiraling state of consumerism that Africa as a whole has been thrown into.
To be fair though, I don’t substantially know whether my failure to get into meaningful hobbies and crafts because of money is the same case for other African youth out there. I just know it’s true for me.
LiteralCate 