Charity begins at home

I've spent most of my life writing about matters I deem dear to my heart. As a teenager, I wrote about my feelings which usually concerned boys, my dreams of becoming the hottest woman alive, my imaginations of being deflowered by this muscle clad, 6 foot 2 hunk which was obviously short lived by reality some years later and the more horrifying fact that not only had I missed out on the 6"2 hunk, the first time ordeal did not involve a short moment of sharp pain followed by endless minutes of sheer pleasure which rocked me to Jupiter and back…. Mills and Boons authors have to be sued for misleading me.

As I grew older my need to write down my daily occurrences (at least the ones I thought were funny) took over. Every detail i thought important penned into my temporary auto-biography.

Today I want to write about something that has affected me greatly. It’s got nothing to do with sex, or the hunk of a man that I pray would be mine forever, its more to do with abject poverty. The type that I have been fortunate enough to avoid the chance of meeting. The type that as long as you can read this note on my page you’ve probably never encountered, or have risen against.

Yesterday, I took a moment to look at a picture posted on my friends wall. What they thought was a funny picture rocked my sense of being. I refused to laugh, I saw what we the fortunate ones in Nigeria always saw. The suffering of others and the jokes we made of their suffering. I’m not sure if this is a measure devised to deal with the suffering, and the fact that we’ve done nothing to aid or improve their state of existence, or if this is just the norm we have come to accept as a way of life. As disturbing as the picture was, I started to think more about the unfortunate state of my Africa, my home country being a point of focus. When you’ve got things easy, you don’t really see how hard

others have it. It’s always around us, but because we don’t live in this reality, we prefer not to see the suffering, the lowly lives that our kindred have found themselves in.

When I look back in time, I remember the times I got on my knees and prayed to God for something as stupid as a new Video player, or a bicycle and even a car just so I could run from one end of the city to the next. In the midst of it all, a child out there just wanted a meal, a good hearty meal. One filled with the right amount of greens, good beef on their plate, not tiny cutlets of the skin of the beef that is barely visible, and good hearty seasonings. A meal nutritious enough to keep them going long enough to wake up the next day and perhaps get a chance to hope for something better.
A pair of shoes, cause the current ones can barely stretch to cover the entire foot, or under pants to cover their nakedness. Under pants that would probably not even be brand new, worn previously by some kid in some western country first before making its way to our dearly beloved 3^rd world country to be hung in the open in very unhygienic markets for a miserly price which they still can’t afford.

While I’m fighting every day to live my dreams, I have come to the realisation that some people don’t even have the opportunity to dream, not because they don’t dare to dream, but because life by default, stole their opportunity to dream. All they’ve got instead is a need. A need to survive this mess called life.

All my life I have prayed that good things happen to me and those around me, but I’ve never prayed for the suffering of my people, because I chose to be ignorant to their pain. Now this picture has touched me, made me see life differently, and while I’m grateful that I’m not a product of this circumstance, I cannot help but remember my people in the struggle. It is my prayer tonight that this child whom someone set out to make a mockery of as a result of her situation, will rise above it. That her current circumstance will not determine her tomorrow. And that she gets a chance to improve her life and those around her.