Thought Picnic: Driven by desire

Driven by desire

I know desire though not like the desire many might have. The things of life that make you think you are not fruitful, productive or going somewhere no matter how hard you try.

There are things people desire for me that I cannot desire for myself, our goals do not match even if one can recognise where they are coming from.

Have I ever desired a wife, not really – I knew there are things about me that meant not burdening others with it too. As wonderful and loving as children are, I could never have them for all sorts of reasons I refused to allow become an all-consuming passion that could lead me to distraction – It is not important.

My peace is most paramount

I have been fortunate not to be subject to societal pressures demanding conformity without acknowledging my individuality though the end of the matter is hardly there – too many people do not have enough to cater for as they mind my business along with theirs.

To be honest, I have given up fighting them, they complain and rant, they abuse and curse, they rail and revile, they blame and excoriate, they contemn and condemn – I see them, I hear them, I read them but I answer them not – not to spite them, not to ignore them, not to belittle them but for the little peace I can find within myself to take each day as it comes and make the best of what time I have left.

But what I have I longed for in the midst of the many misfortunes I have lived to see the loss of in health, in wealth, in home, in work, in peace, in ability and in purpose – a new sense of purpose and a chance to prove that I am more than you can lift off the pages of my thoughts.

Thought Picnic: Licking my wounds

The battles of the mind

And so I sought a place to lick my wounds battered and bruised from the realisation that I am not what I used to be.

Shorn of courage and confidence by reason of time, event and circumstance, each encounter is like I need to tiptoe on the heads of hungry river crocodiles to ford the water from this end to that.

It is hard to be the shadow of the man you used to be – brimming is daring and adventure, out to do feats that angels will shudder to contemplate – now, to be roused comes with doubt and foreboding, the wish for luck and the hope for a win. There must be a time again to lift up one’s head and declare boldly, I will not go down.

Uneasy and unfit

God knows I prepared but never with much rest in body, mind or spirit – I could not concentrate much as I wanted to get things done well and properly. Yes, I took one opportunity to put it off but maybe never with enough time to rethink what might be.

So, restless but not panicked, I went to bed with one last desire to get what I wanted in. It all made sense but I could not make sense of it as sleep came without the rest that should follow.

The die was cast for the deed this day and early in the morn before the cock crew I was wide-eyed, half-determined and slightly bothered – it had to be done.

One is slain and I was beat

There was a time I scheduled 3 tests in a day and got them all done in 70 minutes including coffee breaks that had become the stuff of memoirs to be scripted for legend.

Once, after a heavy night out and literally no study, we are given free vouchers for tests I thought were difficult, I was a somnambulist in auto-pilot as I passed the test half dozing and yawning better than a hippopotamus having fun.

My knees never wobble and I never get to shed a tear when I most need to find out if my tear ducts are still functioning or need a rinse out. I feel myself crying out loud within myself though around me is the deafening cacophony of silence that takes your imagination to the expectation of horror.

It was time to face it; two tests for the prize and thankfully neither your pulse nor your frayed nerves are calibrated for scores. With 25 minutes to spare I scaled the first and with 4 minutes to spare I flunked the second – only just.

Rise!

Back to the drawing board with the hope of more determination and resolve, I have 5 working days to revisit this thing and put it behind me.

I have to appreciate things are harder, I may not have as big a theatre to strut my stuff and thereby for the lack of practice you cannot perfect what you want to show yourself as confident in.

I have licked my wounds enough – Rise up man and go and take the world.

Thought Picnic: The lioness is having her cubs

Up and out, just in time

This Sunday was one where I had to get to church early, I am on the rota for setting up that includes putting out the flags, laying prayer and offering cards on the seats, helping with the offertory and today we also had holy communion.

That extra bit of preparing the bread and the wine or rather the fruit of vine without alcoholic content meant we start 30 minutes early.

The night passed, I having slept like a babe and I was up at 6:00AM. Just a bit too early for comfort and not much to do for rest in the hour between waking up and leaving home at 8:00AM.

My memory of checking the weather forecast from a few days before suggested it might be sunny but not warm but I was not feeling like the 55-minute bicycle ride to church. It meant I could leave home later but I had to catch the tram and metro at the right times to make the connections necessary to be in church on time.

Caught with help

Looking out to the tram terminus from my apartment, the tram had begun to move before I made it out of my door, this normally means I will miss it. Calling the lift to the 7^th floor and running out of the apartment block, the tram had already made it to the stop in from of my block but thankfully, the one other person at the tram stop saw me and delayed the tram for me to scale the barriers and get on. Phew!

I then changed for the metro and had to wait 12 minutes for the next one unsure of it will run to my intended stop or I will have to change unto a substitute bus. That is what the timetable appeared to indicate but I decided not to bother myself with that thought until it was necessary to act on it.

I did not have to change transport. As I got off at my stop and commenced the 7-minute walk to our church building, droplets of rain indicated an unexpected change in the weather and glee at the prescience of not muscling in on my bicycle to end up drenched.

Nature and light

My original Senz umbrella which for all purposes of its design and claims is really only practically suitable for light rains and no wind was put up and before long, I saw a long dark shadow cast before me towards my right.

Engrossed in thought, I remembered that tale from my childhood about what nature is up to when it rains and the sun is shining too. Forget the science of clouds and any other logical explanation because over 40 years on, I can still believe the lioness is giving birth to her cubs somewhere in the bush.

The rain to wash them and the sun to dry them – as the maelstrom of circumstances also beclouds one’s thoughts you also remember that along with the shelter from the rain, the sun shines to give light and seeing the shadow quite clearly also indicates with the light comes warm, insight and hope – it is not time to walk in the dark of your shadow but in the light of the path before you.

Thought Picnic: No more home in a short while

Change has come

The job looks impossible but we have reached what might be termed the inevitable. After almost 10 and a half years in my home by the end of the month, it would have been become part of my history.

I never really did much to my home, it was ready to live in when I bought it and it was hardly 3 years after its being built that I bought it off a couple who in their 70s had bought the place off a plan and were leaving here to move into another new apartment by the river down south where they could get much help with their daily lives.

I thought to myself then that I would love to be able to make decisions redolent of youthfulness just as these people did then. I am reminded more each time to try and retain a sense of youthfulness and a youthful outlook in whatever circumstances I find myself even though it can be a rather hard task.

Packing up

This morning, I had help from friends to purchase and collect packing boxes to pack decades of life and maybe offering the opportunity of divestment of stuff.

Not much of this was planned for and I do not know what lays ahead but hope for the future and possibly the chance to start all over again – the first box is packed and sealed – it is full of books.

The wines going back over 15 years, the shoes too many for two feet, the clothes like a shop for the masses – all these need sorting through and arranged into what should be kept, what should be given away and what is not needful that can be given away – it will be a process of disconnection so as to avoid distraction – Life!

Nigeria: Please Support Project Alert

The appeal

I am writing this blog to ask you to support the work and activities of Project Alert, an NGO that caters for incidences of violence against women in Nigeria.

I believe Nigeria is quite needful of agencies that challenge and address societal, cultural, traditional and religious attitudes that tolerate, condone or encourage the abuse of women and minors. There are too many victims suffering in silence, left in abominable hellish lives because of the stigma of acknowledging problems they have experienced and because the law places undue strain on them giving advantage to perpetrators to terrorise with impunity.

Support for agencies like Project Alert and Prevent Abuse of Children Today (PACT) that I wrote about a few months ago is necessary to ensure that victims of abuse are not permanently damaged without respite, succour or comfort; it is also important that we are able to refer victims to these organisations at the earliest opportunity to get help which might include treatment, counselling, material support or even legal advice – all of which are critical to the healing process.

What you can do

Project Alert requires your support in cash and kind as listed on their Donate page, I hope we can engage some expertise to facilitate an online donation kiosk as well as a courier service to help first as collection points of gifts and then to deliver the gifts to the agency.

• Pledge to support Project Alert
• Help create an online payment kiosk with minimal administrative costs (Pro-bono web gurus?)
• Make material donations to the women’s shelter
• Make cash donations to help run Project Alert
• Offer to ease administrative burdens of collecting and delivering gifts made to Project Alert
• Share information about the services Project Alert offers
• Support activities that promote the rights of women and minors (On blogs, Twitter, Facebook, media, etc. )

Josephine Effah Chukwumah, the Executive Director talks about the activities of Project Alert here and you can find references to Project Alert in the news here.

Project Alert - Contact Details

Ultimately, people need to know they can get help and we all can support those who deploy resources to help. Thank you.

The Backstory

I write a lot and probably do not write enough. However, I have found that much of what I write revolves around human rights; the rights of children, the rights of women, the rights of the poor, injustices, sexual abuse, sexuality and other taboo subjects that need the clear light of day.

The difficult subjects I write about come from my experiences and observations, I may not be able to empathise but I hope that I can at least sympathise with victims of all sorts of abuse and neglect and in the process use my writing to stimulate honest debate and possibly the change that will ensure victims can get help, seek redress and receive justice.

Sharing my own personal experiences has helped me reach out to others who have encountered similar and sometimes more heinous violations of their persons that are beyond description but until we acknowledge the prevalence of these evils we will never be anywhere near being able to help and heal – sometimes, what the other person needs is just someone to believe their story first whilst our society would rather deny the existence of such evils.

Only a few weeks ago, I had someone challenge the notion that boys could be sexually abused, the import being it was more a pleasurable educational experience than a violation of their person and a loss of innocence – only one word could sum up that thinking – IGNORANCE!

My Sex Post

It was just over 5 years ago when some of my blogging friends were writing excited blogs about their first sexual experiences, most of them strove for and lost that innocence in their late teens having exercised curiosity and interest for many years before.

Then, it was customary for these blogs to be written with a template that comprised a series of questions that you had to answer after which you tagged 5 other friends and in the process you socially networked your intimate experiences with boasting and much else.

I was tagged and I did not have the kind of story my friends had to tell, in fact, I could only answer the first question about when I first had sex, the other questions would have been too difficult to answer for a 7-year old even if he had the luxury of putting almost 40 years between that experience and now. [My Sex Post]

We are many, not a few

What surprised me about that blog was the number of people who had had similar experiences as mine, male and female, in the apparent comfort and safety of their homes without anyone to talk to about the violations of their bodies and the loss of their innocence, many still bearing the scars until today.

We need to move on from the constant indifference and denial of the sexual abuse of minors and women in Nigeria and have to appreciate that victims need all the help they can get to deal with paedophiles, incest, rape, harassment, prostitution, battering, mutilation and other unmentionable evils.

If there are other agencies in Nigeria that you know of who address these issues, please do not hesitate to leave a comment.

Thank you.

Thought Picnic: The Times Are Hard

A phone to make you look silly

Veering off the routine of being a hermit I wandered into the city centre to have my mobile phone sorted out. For a while, it was not connecting to Mobile Internet considering it is part of my package, but as I got to the shop, everything seemed to work fine, it left me looking rather silly.

After leaving the shop though, the connection was lost again, it took a complete shut down and restarting of the phone for the service to present any semblance of stability.

Disguises of begging hungry

That however, was not what caught my attention the most but the number of people in all sorts of costumes, fancy dress or masquerade gear looking regal, weird, scary or terrifying.

There must have been 15 of them, some even in pairs, all gesturing to tourist to pose for pictures with them for a token fee. At least 4 were dressed like the Grim Reaper complete with scythe and guttural voices to strike terror in kids and amusement in passers-by.

The competition for curious tourists willing to pose was fierce and keen, what was once an occasional novelty has now become a travesty with tourists literally being jostled, the subtext being, this a sophisticated begging, there are problems out there and it is exemplified in this rather innocuous entertainment.

The times are hard

The once generous safety-nets of social welfare are not as generous and hardly enough to meet daily needs. I would hate to think it is desperate, but the stark reality is only desperation would have driven people to clown around on main streets to eke out a living – God bless their souls.

If the competition was not stiff enough in terms of how bizarre you had to look to be attractive and attract custom, there was this singular lady with an accordion playing tunelessly but expecting a hand-out.

The one that took it to the next level of necessity being the mother of innovation was when I saw a dog posing with sunglasses – for a token amount, you could take a picture. The times are really hard.

Nigeria: How not to deal with the rape of children

The difficult issues

I find myself writing on the issue of our attitudes to rape in Nigeria for the third time in a week because some pertinent matters fail to be addressed between the stigmatisation that bedevils victims of sexual violence and the critical need to see rape as well beyond physiological damage to the emotional scars that result from such traumatic experiences.

In a report that appeared in the Vanguard Nigeria newspaper yesterday, whilst I could see the anger of the parents that was about to be expressed in taking Ekene Dili Chukwu Transport Company Limited to court, which I think they should along with other prosecutions of the nabbed criminals that visited untold terror on the girls, what is most palpable is the denial of the parents of certain detail that has emanated from the ordeal.

Maybe there was no rape

The said students were between the ages of 11 and 16, even though they were attendees of an apparently convent school with the name Holy Rosary College and a principal who happens to be Reverend Sister, it is utterly naïve to suggest that the girls will not know if they had been interfered with, suffered an ordeal or had been subjected to the grossest humiliation by being asked to take off their clothes under threat of harm and menace.

We have been deflected with the notion that one of the girls escaped rape by reason of her menses and another who happened to be a parent was able to convince the hoodlums that she was pregnant and by reason of that the sexual appetite of all the men was fully sated. That stretches my imagination no end, even if I am to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

It is strange that as the transport company is in search of exculpation daring the parents to provide any evidence of rape having taken place, the parents who have vehemently denied that rape had occurred at all are painfully vocal to dispute rape whilst behaving as if they are beyond consolation by reason of their daughters who might have really been raped.

Unseemly notions

It transpired that the girls were asked if they had been raped and none answered in the affirmative and that could have been for all sorts of reasons from having not being raped or the fear and stigmatisation that might ensue from revealing the fact that they had been violated.

However, that is not what really bothers me as much as what the parents themselves have to say of the alleged rape and most especially, a man and no doubt a father of at least one of the girls.

“I don’t think any of the children was raped because if an armed robber rapes a 10 or 13-year-old child, I don’t think that child would be able to walk for one week. And if they were raped, there  would have been blood stains, but when we saw them after the incident there was no blood on their body.  We have asked all of them and none said she was raped and these children cannot lie. We have also taken most of them to Island maternity where doctors who treated them confirmed that they were not raped and we have our medical report to that effect.”

This parent who is the Chairman of the Lagos Branch of the Parents Teachers Association made some incredible assertions.

Que?

• That the rape by an armed robber will present in certain incapacitation – This man must have a concept of rape that is fearful in context and in denial of reality if it did occur without presenting the expected symptoms.
• That blood stains always accompany rape – This might be by reason of his assuming all the girls were virgins and there is nothing to say they weren’t but I really worry about this alarming conclusion.
• That these children cannot lie – I cannot vouch for the sainthood of the children, neither will I question their honesty, but to expect children to come forward as if they were answering a question in class in the presence of their peers is to misunderstand the context, the setting, the situation and their children. I cannot say that I am not utterly saddened by the lack of sensitivity and empathy necessary to address this all in the attempt to deflect the stigma that accompanies rape.
• The more worrisome element to this is that most of the girls were medically examined; however, I do fear that medical validation might have been used to ward off suspicion of rape than to address it such that the man is asserting that there are medical reports to prove the girls had not been raped.

It gets worse

He goes on to aver that, “Although the armed robbers asked them to pull off their dresses when they were searching them for money but when they couldn’t find any money, they asked them to put on their clothes and pushed them into the bus.”

I find that utterly incredible. The armed robbers asked the girls to pull off their dresses in search of money? By which time I had lost all sympathy for the man as I agonised about what the poor girls might have gone through much of which has now been denied, dismissed and made little of by parents hoping to protect their girls from an immediate stigma without addressing the long term consequences of their ordeal.

Are we helping the children?

It again leaves one rather disgusted by the notion that children soon forget what happened to them and time will eventually put this all behind them especially when no one addresses the trauma by ignoring it, in the misguided view that time heals.

It just does not work like that and the earlier we begin to address the matters of rape as having real victims who could well be our daughters and ensuring perpetrators face the full wrath of the law for their unforgivable acts of unimaginable cruelty and violation of our loved ones, more victims will remain voiceless and rape will just be the norm we are ready to tolerate, condone, ignore and deny because we do not have the courage to help victims find a semblance of closure that involves the truth, the therapy and the regaining of confidence and self-esteem to be themselves before the experiences they suffered.

Source

LUXURY BUS ATTACK: Parents threaten to sue transport firm, recount experience | Vanguard Nigeria