Curves and Edges

For as long as I can remember I have always had problems with my weight. This is a confession that some of my closest friends find very hard to believe. This is because at every opportunity I have chosen to mask my insecurity with false confidence. The truth is deep down I am an insecure mess.

This insecurity has stemmed from unkind comments from people including family and friends alike. But like the good natured person I am I never let it show. I carried on with my lifestyle as unhealthy as it was.

However, soon enough the alarm signals started to go up. During a field visit in Serenje one time, my heart tightened and it felt like the devil was scratching it with his finger nails. It was the most agonising five minutes of my life. Yes that is a dramatic statement but if you know me you know I have a flair for the dramatics.

The biggest alarm signal was like a bullet to my head. My beloved albeit crazy mother came skipping into my room proclaiming her new "skinny" weight. The woman that birthed me was now at a solid 80. And me her progeny?  I was sitting pretty at 91kg. To this day I still do not believe that is my weight. I kept convincing myself he scale was cheap for a reason. It probably had a million plus one flaws that somehow added extra kilos to me.

Once it sunk in that I was fatter than my mother. I started he path of self pity. This journey was accompanied by chips, pies and ofcourse romany creams (what is a fat person without romany creams).
I could have let this path shred me to smitherens. However, 2 days ago I got "ah ha" moment!!

I decided during that moment that enough is enough.  And it is my pleasure to announce to you that I am now embarking on a lifestyle change!! Not a diet no, but a complete overhaul of my eating habits. Out with the junk and in with the fresh foods.

During this time, I promise to litsen to my body and let it be my guide.  I will soon post up how exactly I intend to achieve my weight exactly. But I am truly excited to begin this journey.

The Power of Kindness

This post has been inspired by my job. Yes my job. The same job that I (sometimes) whine about.
During my time with Oxfam Zambia I undertook an evaluation with them to understand people's behaviour towards water treatments and their willingness to pay for them.
This work took me to the heart of a peri-urban area called George Compound.  For three months I associated and worked with people from this lively neighbourhood.  Most of my interactions were with women. During this time I grew to love and care for some of these people. But most of all they taught me that there power in humanity.

Often times, even though these women had little to nothing, I hardly left without a parting gift. A cup of munkoyo, a freezit or even a plate of nshima were often shared with me as a symbol of courtesy.

During hot days when all we could do was sit and chat, my visitations became sources of comfort for these women. I was greatly humbled by how much they confided in me. Some of these women had passed through life's worst troubles and yet they still were going strong. Through this I began to feel empathy not sympathy but empathy. Even though my simple life was tonnes better than their own lives, I identified with their state.
Even in my own misery I found comfort in these women. On cold, rainy days I remember being offered hot water for tea and tonnes of rugs under my feet to keep me warm.  I remember being offered a cold drink from one woman's stock on an unusually hot day. Alot of what they gave took great sacrifice.  As simple as it maybe these kind gestures ingrained in me a deep lesson.
A lot of these women did not expect anything from me but they freely gave what little they had to me out of their humanity.  I had nothing more to offer them and they knew this but they did it anyway. 
This is a life lesson I hope to pass on to others who cross my path. Being good is not done ouy of duty or out of selfish gain. It is done out of love. Being good should not have conditions. You are good to people because you are a good person. A friend once told me "A man who is rude to the waiter is not a good man at all". The point of thay little quote is that kindness and goodness are not selective qualities.

A bemba quote says "Lesa ala bwekeshapo" and I know that as simple as those acts of kindness were, Jehovah God saw through their hearts and rewarded them in time. That is the sort of person I now strive to be. A practitioner of goodness, having no partiality but self sacrificing in ways.

What I give will not be limited to material things. A kind smile or even a hug are going to be added to my bag of goodies.

To the women who taught me this profound life lesson Thank You. We may not speak often but my heart has never betrayed you ♡

Time ticks away...

Recently a friend of mine reminded me that we were less than 5 months away from 2014. Ah Oh!! I don't know about you, but for me it is another year of unfulfilled resolutions. I am usually not very concerned when I don't achieve resolutions. However, something in me has triggered panic this time around. I realise that in the next year I will be 24 that is 6 more years to the landmark age of 30. I really do not want to look back at my life and have an avalanche of "what ifs" clouding my happiness.

I have always had a vague idea of what kind of life I have wanted to have. Vague it has been but the point is it is there. If you ask me now, how much of it aligns with that vague plan, I might be reluctant to tell you. This state of non-achievment has resulted not from laziness but from coasting along. I will be honest and tell you that I really have not packed in much effort in achieving some of my dreams.

I have promised myself that all that is about to change. And this time I am not waiting for the stroke of midnight to take out my journal and list my goals. From time to time I will chronicle my journey. Here is a list of my goals.

1) Weight loss, weight loss, weight loss!!
    Yes you have heard it all before but I NEED to do this. The death of my father recently made me realise    how fickle life is and how I need to take care of my health if I am to be around for a long time.

2 )Cutting my hair
    Yes after much internal debate I have decided to go natural and cut off my relaxed mane. It is something I have grappled with coming from a background of severely low self-esteem.

3) Enlarge my professional skills set.

4) Learn how to drive
    I recently got so emotional when I realised my daddy never got to see me drive. So this is really not for me but for him.

I will not overwhelm myself, however I intend to achieve all four of these goals before the curtain closes on 2013.

Atinzwa

He heard my prayer,
Looking at you,
I know he heard my prayer.
I have never met you
but I know.

We are years apart,
but i can feel the love I have for you already.
I hope you have my smile and my smiling eyes.
I hope you have my skin tone, be proud of it, Kings and Queens have had it too.

I hope I am a good mum.
I hope when you have scabs and sores i kiss them better.
I hope you look up at me and I give you inspiration.
Inspiration to be a better person and to change the world.

Have I taught you how to pray? I surely hope I have, It is the best form of communication there is.

Am i unbearable sometimes? I am sorry, I am learning too.
Whatever mistakes I have made in my life, they have been made right in you.
I have already named you, your name is Atinzwa, because I know he has heard my prayer.

I hope I am seeing you grow,
If I am no longer around,
this is a re-affirmation of my love for you.

Tongues and Words

I sat at the back of the bus, uncomfortably of course as had become the norm during every bus ride. The lady next to me constantly peeking at my phone, I tilted it so  I could not feed her curiosity. We were approaching my usual stop and so in my best local language accent i reminded the conductor that I would be dropping off. Everyone turned to see the girl who spoke. I was quite used to this by now so I was not phased at all. However, one man quite elderly in appearance looked at me with a fleeting look of pity. He didn't need to tell me and I did not need to ask him what wrong I had committed. We both knew...
 
Growing up, my parents encouraged me to speak English and urged me to constantly improve my English vocabulary. Local languages were learned as a by the way thing. Therefore, before I was even in my pre-teens I spoke the Queen's language eloquently. But deep down I always felt a need to learn my very own language. So slowly I picked up Bemba and Nyanja till i became conversational. Although my newly acquired local language skills sufficed, I always felt insecure speaking it fearing that I would make some unforgivable error.

It was not until i grew up into my twenties, that i realised how beautiful my mother tongue is and just how much I was missing. Since then I have strived to learn new words and speak more of my mother tongue.

However, the truth is the world we live in seems to have no place for the african language. Our teachers speak to us in English so that we "pass our exams". We are told that in order to win people over we have to speak English like the English themselves. Our constitution honours the Queen with her language. And all these things beg the question "who is giving the Zambian language a chance to survive??"

Why can we not teach our children in our local language. Surely we would be preserving our culture right? Why should the document that governs our ways of life be written in another's language. If such great strides can not be made then perhaps it can be done at a micro level. Parents do your children know their heritage? Can they speak their language?

I hope one day I am blessed with children, and if I am I want to remind them that theirs was a language spoken by noblemen in their own right. Warriors and Heroes share their heritage. What have you done to preserve your heritage today??

Kuda.

Above all else choose CLARITY

Clarity-a sense of being clear. Those few words have engulfed my mind this entire week. Now let me emphasise I am NOT at some confused state in my life neither am i confused about who I really am. However, the clarity I wish to achieve is related to my goals and dreams but most importantly to the relationships I have cultivated or thought I cultivated.

I recently had a conversation with a good friend from varsity.  She asked "do you know so and so is now engaged" I did not know this and I mentioned it to her. I was a little hurt that I did not know that "so and so" was now engaged because in my mind she was my bestfriend. However, when I pondered over his fact,  I came to the realisation that "so and so" had become nothing less than a stranger to me. We had not spoken in so long and could hardly maintain flowing conversation when we met. Then it hit me, "why am I holding on to something that has been lost for forever?"

I realised then that I was investing resources into dead weight. I was using words and phrases that did not fully correspond with the reality on the ground.

Needless to say I started a stocktake and boy was it eyeopening. Not only did I realise that my 'best friend' and I had nothing in common, I realised that my favourite uncle wasn't even my uncle. So then I decided it was time to clarify my life. No longer was I going to put precious resources into relationships that were literally failed states. Instead I was going to focus and re-channel all that precious energy into nurturing the relationships I already had that were blossoming. No longer was I going to spend my life as an inbetweener you know in a state of being there but not quite there.
However, I have also started to take the clarifying process a step further and henceforth I am extending it to my social media persona. I realise now the person I am is an aggregate of the different people I surround myself with and to a large extent this includes people I interact with on social media. Therefore I am now clarifying those relationships putting them in their place. I am also purging myself of people on social media who drain me. How many times have you ever complained about someone's status update or their inappropriate photos? Do you realise that the time to waste on complaining could be channeled into something useful. Now I respect people's personal space and hence I realise I can not control their actions even on social media but I can control MY actions. Consequentially,  the relationship between me and the unfollow/unfriend button has developed. I have also decided to put a buffer on my social media life and my personal life.  I can not share everything I am on social media because I realise I enable people with a canvas on which they can depict me however they please. And I will not give them the satisfaction of doing that. This process has taught me an overlooked truth, I am responsible for ME therefore I engineer my goals, dreams and ambitions.
A huge part of the achievment/realisation of my goals and dreams is the link they share with the relationships I hold. No matter how self-assured you are, people will always shape your life, which people is entirely dependent on you.

Now before  I face lawsuits I am not encouraging the use of middle fingers or hate filled texts. Sometimes these people have not done anything necessarily wrong. It's just that the relationship has not worked out. It happens some people are meant to be forever and some are just there to fulfill a certain need. That is the cycle of life.

So I urge each and every one of you to embrace clarity and start to really re-evaluate the relationships you have and consider if they have turned to dead weight.