Pursuit To Happiness

I often ride 100 km on R2 and observe young boys herding cattle in Ntabazinduna & Mbembesi, some loading logs/firewood onto a donkey drawn scorch cart. By young I mean 10 years old. Then when I ride on A7 I see women and young girls tilling the land, this always strikes my conscience and really sits at the back of my mind as I'm stepping on the pedals chasing wind and watching all scenery whiz by. Rural children learn great responsibility at such a young age; Chopping wood and controlling a donkey back home is the indigenous equivalent of contemporary truck loading and driving to the delivery bay, it's a great responsibility, herding cattle too and tilling the land. I didn't grow up doing such things, many urban kids don't even know how to start a fire or make a garden bed. But in the country side, straight after school, they are walking a distance to go and fetch water, they are trodding into the fields to herd cattle back home, they are feeding fowl, t

I was denied a visa to the United Kingdom and turned around at the embassy up the Sandton Mall with a sore heart that I would never ever settle with my family, that has been the constant reality to this day. So on watching a video of Jeffery Mayi seeing his mom for the first time in 10 years I understood the overwhelming emotions that caught him absolutely off guard because it was so contagious. He cried like a baby regardless of his adult stature. Many people, especially African children who've reached fair adulthood today, were denied visa's to America, Australia, England, Germany, Canada etc and God knows the realities they've endured throughout the course of their lives from henceforth living without their families. Growing up we always lived with the idea that we'd soon join our families abroad. Our distant parents made sacrifices to get us enrolled at private schools so we could learn with Western speaking folk to polish up our English French or German

I was in the first class back in High-School, it wasn't by mistake, favouritism or abuse of some power. There were nine classes in one stream, being in the last class would have been the most inappropriate placement of a student such as myself. However, I didn't perform to par in the first class and it wasn't because I was stupid or dum, I just had susceptable irregular issues that interfered with my academic performance which also got in the way of my being a prefect, in fact we extended Prep time to 10PM and woke up at 4AM to read at that boarding school, I wasn't the one to snooze or doss on my books. I often meet my classmates in the city and have a rap; some are in college, some are comedians, some musicians, some miners, some in ministry and it always amuses me just how things don't really always turnout how society conventionalizes them to. Who'd have thought a first class student would be a vendor and a last class student would be a renow