Please endeavour to go through this at your leisure time Its long but its worth the time.Got it from a friend.It helps us appreciate the fact that life is a gift and the best we can put back into it is to try and touch the lives of the everyday people we most times ignore.
Be Inspired to touch a life today
This is from a column (Segun Adeniyi) in one of the Nigerian dailies (This Day, March 3rd or so, 2006). I just feel like sharing it. I first read the story of the girl back in 2004.
Dear bro. Segun, good morning. Please it is only from you I can seek for this help. Please, I want to tell you that my mum is not feeling fine so I need your help. Even before I was coming to church this morning she had not taken anything because there is nothing with us, no money and no food. So I tried to tell her that I will inform you, may be you can help us for some money, so we can use to manage for her health. God bless you as you help, it's me (name withheld).
Given the state of the economy that has turned many otherwise respectable people into beggars, we all, from time to time, recieve these kinds of letters from friends, relations and sometimes the next-door neighbour. Of course, most often, the situation is not as grim as it is being painted. But the fact that someone would beg depicts a certain level of deprivation though one is also mindful of the fact that begging has become an industry in Lagos. That explains why when I received the foregoing letter in Church last Sunday morning, I tried to ask the brother who brought it to identify the sender. He pointed in the direction of about six well-dressed teenage girls and I concluded it must be one of those letters since none of the people I saw could have been going through the situation so described in the letter.The particular girl he pointed at happened to be active in church and she looked anything but hungry so I concluded that she probably needed money to buy GSM recharge card. By the way, buying a recharge card has become such a heavy burden for ladies nowadays that no lie is considered too big just to get 'credit'. Well, I called a friend's wife, Mrs. Ronke Kayode, to discuss with the girl to find out what her real problem was and I soon forgot about it. A disciplinarian, Mrs. Kayode detailed three men to follow the girl home to pray for the 'sick mother' and to take some money along just in case the tale happened to be true. By the time they came back, however, the reality hit us hard that we are really in trouble in this country.The home of this girl happened to be a dingy face-me-I-face-you room she shares with her mother and three other siblings in a part of Yaba generally regarded as a slum. The brothers who went said they could not stay beyond ten minutes in the place because they were almost suffocating in the room reeking with indescribable odour of poverty. The mother was indeed sick and she and her four children, including the girl, actually had nothing to eat. Having been abandoned by her husband, father of the children, she sells what they call 'paraga' (dry gin usually sold to local touts). The girl herself finished secondary school a year ago and without any prospect of further education, she has been looking for a job that is not there.I have had to worry about that girl since Sunday because if she could be facing that type of ordeal with the facade of all-is-well I see around her all the time, I wonder how many young people in our country today go about hungry and helpless. Yet from what we can see now, things can only get worse as real income shrinks against a rising population. This should be a serious challenge for all of us. Because if, for instance, a girl had not eaten and there was no prospect of how her family would feed, then chances are high that she would use what 'she has' to get what she needs. None should therefore wonder why prostitution has almost become a compulsory course on our campuses. Whether we want to admit it or not, there must be a nexus between the level of moral decay in the society and the seeming hopelessness of many of our young people. What makes our situation particularly sad is that young people are the hardest hit by poverty because it destroys the potentials for their physical, mental and intellectual development, all of which have terrible consequences for the future, especially when it is agreed that if a child's growth and development is stunted by poverty, this often becomes a lifelong handicap. And with poverty in many Nigerian homes today, what really does the future hold for us as a nation?...
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When I wrote the foregoing lengthy piece on July 22, 2004, in my column titled My Mum is Sick and There's No Food..., I did it not to seek charity for the girl whose story I used to illustrate the message but rather to draw attention to the level of poverty within our society and to arouse the conscience of those in authority. My contention was, and still is, that most Nigerians see money and power as end in themselves and not as means to advance the development of the people. Incidentally, while the message was lost on those for whom it was meant, some people were touched by the story of the girl that they volunteered to help. Mr. Akin Malaolu invited me to his office and gave N20,000. My friend, Usman Umar, leveraged his position at MTN to secure for her a job that would have fetched N20,000 a month, so she could at least help to put food on the family table. But while it was still being processed, the JAMB result came out and the girl scored 259 marks, high enough a grade to get her admission into the University of Port Harcourt.I spoke to the Speaker of the River State House Assembly, Hon Rotimi Amaechi, on the possibility of his intervention in the girl’s education and he said I should remind him at the next meeting of the National Stakeholder Working Group of Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) of which we are both members. Amaechi is a progressive-minded politician with a social conscience and my interactions with him in the last two years have reinforced my belief that there are indeed good people in government. Even while domiciled in Port Harcourt, he has been very active in NEITI work whereas his colleagues in National Assembly who reside in Abuja have not shown as much commitment.My plan was to persuade Amaechi to get the state government to take up the responsibility for the girl's education as an indigene. While he was, however, ready to help, it turned out that the girl actually hailed from Bayelsa state and that door closed. But notwithstanding, he still gave me N100,000 for her mother to start some little business while promising N50,000 for the girl, a promise he kept. But having decided that the Teens Unit of my church which I head would take up the education of the girl, I asked Amaechi whether he would be ready to support me financially if I needed assistance while the girl was in school and he answered in the affirmative. Meanwhile, I brought the money he gave me to church and handed over to my pastor (Niyi Ajibola) who detailed another pastor, Gbenga Olanlokun, to liaise with the girl's mother who became a member of the church and was thereafter being cared for by the parish. Meanwhile, the girl went to register at the University of Port-Harcourt and she also began a new life. A few weeks in school, however, she called me frantically that she gathered her mother was terribly sick and wanted to come home. She did and money was provided for her to take her mother to the hospital. The next day she came to my office crying. Her mother had been diagnosed as HIV positive. I was not surprised because given to the woman’s physical condition, it was almost too glaring she had full-blown AIDS. In all these troubles, I always marveled at the girl’s strength with the enormous burden she had to shoulder at age 18. With the development concerning her mother's health, Pastor Niyi had to detail a pleasant mother of another teenager, Mrs. Bunmi Utomi, as the woman's guardian and she was rather wonderful in the ways she related with the woman who, perhaps for a long time in her life, saw love. Her condition, however, taught me several lessons about life and in all my interactions with her, I was always conscious of the fact that she had but a short time to live.Of course, no one is sure whether he or she would live long or would die young but in her own case, long life was already out of the question. Eventually, last November, she succumbed to death. This was a fatal blow but the girl took it very stoically when she came from school. Fortunately, my Head of Department, Mrs. Folake Fajemisin of First City Monument Bank (FCMB), took a special interest in her and had become more of a mother to her.I most often reflected on the life of the girl with imagination that she would end up a success story, someone whose tale would inspire many young people that notwithstanding the hard knuckles of life, one could rise above adversity to become something. I had this conviction because even as young as she was, she already had an understanding of what it meant to bear her misfortune with exemplary grace. To me it was good that she could still dream and I was happy to be part of the story. I just felt that she was coming from a background of sheer hopelessness, the kind most of us see around us everyday now. I believe without any iota of doubt that a girl like that had a story to tell in future. You can then imagine my shock last Friday when my pastor called to say that he had bad news from the University of Port Harcourt: The girl and another student as well as the okada rider carrying them were all crushed to death by a trailer!At the time the news was broken to me, I was with my aged parents in Ilorin and when I broke down in tears they were quite naturally alarmed. After I had narrated the pathetic story, wondering why such calamity could befall such a girl, my mother, in trying to calm me down, said: "You are reacting like that because you are a small boy. If you live long enough, as we have, you will see more of such mysteries..."For almost an hour, I listened to an unsolicited sermon about life but that still did not take away the fact that a sudden, unexpected death like the girl's is usually harder to accept than an anticipated death for which we have had time to prepare. The circumstance of her death, which is rather cheap, also greatly complicates the grieving process. That perhaps explains why the last few days have for me been a rather sobering period because when an elderly person close to you dies, it is said that you lose a part of yesterday; but when you lose a young person for whom you cared, you lose a lot of tomorrow. The death of the girl has brought to me the futility of life and all our daily struggles. She obviously had dreams, having suffered deprivation through no fault of hers beyond the accident of birth. But then, we also had dreams for her, thinking of the endless possibilities of what she could do for her other siblings and perhaps even her run-away father. But all of these turned out as mere vanity of human wishes. Expectedly, it was an emotional period for all my teenagers in church last Sunday when the news was broken. Tears flowed freely but there was nothing we could do. The reality though is that whether we are young or old, poor or rich, powerful or powerless, beautiful or ugly, we would all answer the call of death at one unknown point in time. Death is, however, one thing people hardly want to talk about, even those of us who preoccupy our minds with making heaven. Yet, a reflection about death, which remains the most significant but often unconsidered variable in the cold calculations of those whose minds are forever fixated on acquiring ill-gotten wealth or perpetuating themselves in power, would help. Because it brings home the reality that there are situations for which we have no control. For the first time in years, I have in the last one week closed my mind to the happenings around me: The anti-democratic antics of Ibrahim Mantu and his third term orchestra, the roforofo Senate fight between Taliban Sule Yari Gandhi and Militant Lee Maeba, the rising political tension and the intermittent telephone calls from the Niger Delta MEND hostage takers. The loss of the girl at such a tender age and in that gruesome manner has indeed brought home the message in the poem by an anonymous author. I commend it to readers as I bid goodnight to Justina:
The clock of life is wound but once,And no man has the power,To tell just when the hands will stop,on what day or what hour.
Now is the only time you have,So live it with a will,Don't wait until tomorrow,The hands may then be still.
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