31 December 2015

Sharing or Begging? The power of Sharing!



You may (or may not) agree with me but 'sharing' is a twin sister to 'begging' and both are always confused for each other! Please accept my apology for hating one and loving the other sister! I hate it when all I have said sums up into begging! It makes me nervous, confused and scared of losing a relationship. I love sharing my passion and speaking on behalf of others for this makes me stronger, confident and brings a form of satisfaction far greater than what I derive from the best meal.

I may be 'wired' differently but could be because of the implicit meaning the two words got when I was a child striving for survival, during the years when I wandered around the village looking for anything to eat! If I sounded begging, I would be banned from some compounds rightly because the people there  had enough problems. If I was taken for sharing what I  (and my siblings) were going through, we would get someone to walk along with, a person who would always check on us or share with another person about our simplest but greatest need, food. Sometimes sharing would bring some gifts in form of fruits. The best sharing season was the mango season! We could be allowed to sit under the mango tree and eat all we could. It was time to cover some past but also future meals! You can imagine the struggle to eat as much because you were not sure you will be allowed to sit under the same tree the next day!

Truth be told sometimes the gifts we got were not tangible but could be felt and heard! Allow me share one memory about intangible gifts! Soon after our mom passed on, the most treasured of our two neighbors was one lady we only knew as Jjajja (meaning grandma) who lived furthest but visited us at dusk everyday to ask if we were well and had found something to eat during the day. We eagerly waited for her even on those 'unlucky' days! Honestly, there were very few days when she came with food but on all her visits she listened to the three of us as we aimed at making her feel how painful it was to live that day without our dear mom! On the days when we had to sleep on empty stomachs, Jjajja struggled to tell us 'stay strong the tomorrow is going to be better'. 

Gives memories of 'under the Mango tree' meals
Sometimes the next day would be worse but Jjajja would return and promise the following day would be different! We loved her because we felt and heard her! Oh, on the days she found one of us shivering, she could find herbs she believed would help, squeeze them in (dirty) water to make medicine. She would return the next day in the morning with doodo (wild but edible vegetables) which she would serve us with warm water spiced with herbs. If we took two days without anything solid for a meal, Jjajja walked to a neighbor she knew would give us some food on our behalf! Surprisingly, Jjajja would even get some food from compounds where we were less known and all those where we had been banned for begging. She did this for several months before we relocated to another area when our only house collapsed. She is long gone but still living in my heart.  


2015 has been a great year for our ministry! All our achievements have been because we worked as a team.  Congratulations. You have sacrificed in various ways to be able to support what we do and together we have given more children an opportunity to dream, giving them hope. It did not happen all at once, it was gradual - a new step for another child at a time. Wow!! As you can imagine there are other children wishing the next step fell on them! Who knows, maybe we can make more steps in 2016?! 

Forgive my wild imagination but what if you became a  'Jjajja' of some kind? I know some of you are already special Jjajjas but you can make another one. One way to become and make another Jjajja is to sharing what we are doing together with another person or organization/group!

Happy New Year! 



Angela and Phiona are twin sisters with hope to become an engineer and a doctor respectively

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