Beatrice Ofwona
14 June 2008
column
Nairobi — As I tried to make out the muffled and inaudible words of an announcement on a domestic flight, I pondered over how sometimes the very simplest of occurrences also offer life's greatest lessons and insights. What started out as a journey of 1,000 miles culminated in our taking tentative steps to a project that landed me in the most unlikely of lessons, three really.
We tend to take our health for granted until we come face to face with circumstances that remind us of how grateful we should to be for it. First was the lad who presented himself to one of us, a doctor, and pleaded to be freed from the excruciating pain that he was experiencing. A year of continuous assessments and treatments too late, he saw his only source of salvation in the cloud of dust that bellowed on his face as a certain doctor's car cruised into the village.
The hope with which he presented his case touched all who were there at that moment, and although his fears were quickly dispelled after a thorough browse of his X-ray, his plaintive cry that he be assured that his condition would not harm him made us pensive.
For among us are people for whom every breath drags with it pain whose every heartbeat is a strain on an already feeble body, whose every waking moment brings with it the fear of death and every rising sun a spell of torturous uncertainty. And so infiltrated into our minds the lesson on health and how we should be appreciative when we are healthy and strong.
Craning our necks to take a peek at the X-ray results of which our untrained eyes thought spelled doom, the second lesson on educating a child passed fleetingly through my mind. It did not escape our notice, and this despite the fact that we were from different professions and could well hold our fort in our different fields, that the effectiveness and authoritativeness that this particular professional used as he browsed and delivered a much needed prognosis relaxed the tensed-up and worried face of a lad who had walked miles to be told that his condition was not as life-threatening as he might have thought.
In a split second of interweaving the scenes unfolding before us was the revelation that the most important thing parents could ever give a child is education, and that whether they are alive or not when the child dispensed of this educative acquisition was the cosmic assurance that they would always be blessed for having set the ball rolling.
A last-minute dash to a village that had no occupants, save for a scruffy, wild-eyed little boy whose playground it was, offered the last lesson - on wealth acquisition. As he suspiciously opened the gates to us, I observed, doting either side of the hauntingly beautiful but unoccupied homestead, graves that gave an ironic finality to a play that had once been life before the curtains dropped. In the eerie silence of this contrast, life mocked us all in our pursuit of what we could never carry with us when death beckoned.
Among us there are people who have been able to work backwards, giving all of themselves until they are called yonder, but always leaving legacies that remain in people's hearts, works in progress that are intangible but valuable; words of wisdom that build character, sermons that empower, smiles that light up hearts or maybe just hands that soothe away pain.
And as I again wondered at legacies, I thought too of the invaluable lessons I had learnt on health, education and real wealth.
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