Articles I Never Posted…. Until Now

Let me be real with you. Sometimes, I doubt myself! 

Even at things that I’m clearly good at such as writing and farting; sometimes I still think to myself “you’re doing this wrong”. 

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of writing but have been too scared to complete or post them. They usually start out as a brilliant topic with a captivating story but somewhere along the way,  I convince myself that the piece is not good enough to go live so I abandon them like grains at the bottom of a cereal box. 

Today I’m holding nothing back. 

First, I tried to tell you about Prisca 

In junior secondary school, I had a friend named Prisca. Prisca was older than the average JSS3 student. She was short, plump and liked to sag her school skirt because it made her butt shake. She liked me and that made me feel good because getting friends as an oily skinned, homely child with bad hair was tough. Prisca got temporary tattoos on her thighs every week and told me “they help me make money”. I never asked how. She owned a smart phone which contained porn and repeatedly told me to stop being so bookish. She was the one friend that my parents could never know I had. After junior secondary school,my family moved across the state so I had to change school and the only way to keep in touch was via phone calls and ‘facebook’. I loved this girl and the food she got me every break time for 2 years,  but when she handed me that piece of paper bearing her phone number while saying ‘call me as soon as you get a phone,  I knew that would be the last of her pimpled face and chirpy voice that I’d see or hear.

Then I tried to tell you about my fascination with groundnut 

When I was ten years old,  my elder brother convinced me that groundnut was made by roasting beans on medium heat. I was doubtful but he laid a strong argument by telling me that you could divide a bean seed into two equal halves just as you could divide a groundnut. He further explained that the brown things that the women roasted in the streets looked exactly like bean seeds, so it had to be the same thing. We set out to prepare this delicacy for ourselves and on a day when all the adults in the house were not around, we snuck into the kitchen and took out the frying pan. Then we grabbed handfuls of beans and tossed it in the pan which we placed on the stove. Seconds turned to minutes and the bean seeds turned to black seeds. Still no groundnut. Forget the Great Wall of China, this was the biggest wonder of the world to me. Why didn’t the beans turn to groundnuts? What did we do wrong? Was it because we couldn’t get dry sand? Was that part of the ingredients? This occupied my mind for months and everytime I held a piece of groundnut I would  wonder how it came to be. About 6 months later, I eventually got the courage to ask the woman who sold groundnuts on my street how she made them and she explained to me that groundnut seeds were completely different from bean seeds even though they had the same colour. It finally made sense!

Finally, I tried to answer a very important question “Is The World Getting Better?”

 I recently watched a speech given by Trevor Noah, who is also my best friend(Ha ha!! I’m kidding! Or am I?). The topic he spoke on was the question “is the world getting better?” He said that although majority of the people in the world believed that the world was getting worse, he believed that the world was getting better because we have access to information that make us think the world is getting worse. Confusing huh? Let me explain. We see horrible things in the news; deaths, poverty,  insecurity, terrorism and so on. These information make us believe that the world is getting worse but Trevor insists that having access to such information is proof that we world is getting better because the world has always been bad but now, at least we know it. 

I was so intrigued by his perspective that I decided to dig a little bit into the world statistics. I was extremely shocked to read that based on the figures, the world was actually becoming a better place! Poverty was reducing, healthcare was improving and majority of the world population had better access to education. So why did a lot of people believe that the world was going down the drain? I guess the media! For reporting mostly bad news… But isn’t that their job? To report bad things so we could avoid them in the future? Or maybe we’re to blame! For feeding off negative news and forming opinions based on them! I was so confused. 

So I took my confusion to a wise friend and she changed the entire narrative. She said “The world isn’t getting better because soon enough we won’t have a world to live in”. She opined that although the world was doing better at stuff like education, technology, poverty and so on,  we were constantly destroying our planet with things like; deforestation, poaching, non-renewable energy and non-biodegradable materials. I had to agree with her. 

I still live with my confusion. Is the world getting better? On one hand it is. On this other hand it’s not. Truthfully, I don’t know the answer to the question.

While creating a wordpress profile, I described myself with these words

I want to make the world a better place, one blog post at a time. 

Writing about Prisca, Groundnut or Trevor Noah and not publishing those posts defeats my goal. So even though, I’m not proud of incomplete stories and inconclusive arguments, I posted these today so that I could at least say I tried. Reading this post(or collection of posts) may or may not make you have a better day,  it may not contribute to world peace or gender equality but it has made me a better and happier person. Thanks for watching me try! Byeeeeeeeeee

Xoxo.