 |
| TSO COORDINATOR & MRS. SHEILA SOLARIN |
“Don't go around saying the world owes you
a living.
The world owes
you nothing. It was here first.”
MARK
TWAIN
I would like to suggest that the only thing that is certain in this
millennium is uncertainty. The
world is changing rapidly and we will have to change with it, whether we are
ready or not. It will surely be better to prepare for this uncertain
future.
You
should grasp at every shred of education and work experience that you can get. If you
have a week or two of vacation, or a compulsory stay-at-home for a strike, look
around for what work needs doing in your area and start doing it voluntarily. Don’t look only for what you will be paid
for. If there are potholes in your street, look for broken blocks or an
abandoned heap of laterite. Get others
of your kind together, beg for a shovel and a derelict bucket or head-pan and
fill some of those potholes thoroughly. Get used engine oil from a local
mechanic to pour on top of your filling. This will protect it from the rain to
some extent. You will feel so good, you will have got physical exercise and you will have shown what is possible
without money. Who knows, you may one day be a PWD engineer, or a local
government chairman, and you will remember what you learnt. Above all, you will have learnt to be a leader, not a
follower.
Volunteer to work in a local hospital – read stories to
children, hold the hands of someone afraid or in pain. Look round and see what
you can do to help. I am not suggesting
that you are going to spend your life in a poverty-stricken volunteer, but you
will learn a lot from any kind of work experience.
As I said above, get every shred of education you can. I would
like to emphasize mathematics, science and English. These are your core
subjects in secondary school. You can read up subjects such as history,
geography, economics and literature at anytime, but you must get the basic
rudiments in mathematics, English and science. Your science should be as
practical as possible, so try to encourage your teachers to give you
practicals. Volunteer to help set up, clean up and put away equipment. Your
teachers are probably overwhelmed by the number of students and lack of
equipment. Try to suggest politely ways in which students can help. You and the
teachers are not in opposing teams. You are on the same side, facing the same
goal post.
When you reach the end of Junior Secondary class 3, you have
to be thinking of your choice of subjects. Try to make sure that your results
are good enough to offer at least biology and chemistry, and physics if you
can. The world we are in – the millennium
we have just moved into – needs science and technology. Don’t opt for physical
education or religious knowledge because you can get marks. You may get through
Senior Secondary
class 3 and university and end up with a useless qualification. Music
and art should be taught and should be enjoyed, but remember that very few
people make a good living from either of these. The same goes for football.
Sure, an international footballer may get, for a few years, a salary beyond its
widest dreams but count how many such footballers there are. Get a degree in,
say, biochemistry and play football thereafter. When your football career is
over, you will go back to your biochemistry for the rest of your life – perhaps
another twenty or thirty years after the period you spent on football.
Aim at
becoming computer literate by whatever means. One of
those compulsory breaks from university may give you a couple of months for a
short computer course. Befriend somebody who has a computer. Offer to clean his
car, do up his garden, scrub his cement yard or wash his clothes in exchange
for half an hour on his computer. Read the theory by all means but try to get
your hand on somebody’s keyboard. Bill Gates never went to computer school. His
mother got hold of a computer from somewhere and he learnt as a teenager what
he needed to know to become one of the world’s richest young men – a computer
wizard.
Consider what you can do to be self-employed. If you want a job
these days, you had better make one. What
about making work and wealth from waste? There are a few people in Lagos
combing the rubbish heaps for reusable materials but they are not well
organised and do not own the processing equipment themselves to turn the
rubbish into something useful.
You can sell waste paper, scrap metal, glass and cloth. Get
yourself a collecting cart, two bicycle wheels, a rectangular metal bottom with
the sides heightened with iron mesh. Go around your collecting area on the same
day every week, so that your visit will be expected. If you can afford to divide the inside of
your cart into three sections, then you could collect paper in one, glass in
one and metal in the other section. After your round, you have to press the
paper into bales.
Reusable tins and bottles can be sold off to those who reuse
them for selling palm oil, vegetable oil, etc. Other metals need sorting into
types – aluminium and iron will be separated. Factories producing aluminium
pots and pans accept aluminium for recycling and pay for it. Plastic can be
recycled also to coat hangers and similar small items. Cloth can be cut up and
turned into rugs or reprocessed for re-spinning and weaving.
Clearly,
one quality you have to put aside is pride. What
will my mates say when they see me collecting rubbish? Perhaps, ultimately you
will have a small business producing coat hangers and your mates will still be
dressing up to carry their application letter from door to door looking for a
job ten years after they graduate.
If you
are going into business, be ready to start small, producing something people
want. ‘Eleganza’ knew what he was doing when he started producing
coolers for carrying food for parties. Which household does not own one, or
does not hope to get one? Slippers we need; carpets we can live without.
If you
can manage to have two businesses going – especially if one is seasonal – you
will have a better chance of surviving. If you
drill a small borehole and produce bottled water, you could run it in the dry
season and farm during the rains. In
China, on a commune we visited, the farm was a fruit farm but they also produce
children’s cloth (which Nigeria imports from them) when there was not much work
on the farm. Nigerian farmers are largely idle throughout the season.
In the U.S.A. and United Kingdom, there are special
department stores where all kinds of handcraft from the Third World are sold.
You will find embroidery and crochet work from Zimbabwe, carvings from Ghana,
textiles from India, small items of furniture from Thailand – from Nigeria,
nothing. Yet this country has a wealth of handsome cloth, pottery, wood carving
and metal work we do not seem able to show the world. All of these could be
produced in the dry season as a second leg on which to stand when times are
hard. You might also make a business out of going round the country collecting
craft items for export.
If you
are lucky enough to get a job at any point in your career, make sure you do
more than you are asked to do. Tai worked an average of 15 to 16 hours per day
all the time I knew him. Even before he came back from Europe,
he had worked on a farm in Sweden and hit the headlines as the man who could
pick twice as many potatoes in a day as any other farm worker. When he was in
the Air-force in Canada, he collected from the dustbins the socks that his
mates were too lazy to wash. He washed them and sold them back to those who had
thrown them away.
When I was a student, I sold cloth in the Saturday market,
cleaned the apartment for one bachelor and mended socks for another. I worked
as a waitress in a hotel in the long vacation; one summer I worked on a farm.
On fine days we were outside working on the fruit farm. On raining days we were
inside packing sweets made from fruit juice, or making wooden crates to pack
the fruits for market. There was no day
when a lazy worker could put his head down on the table.
Tai
also worked as a mortuary attendant. And he was already a graduate at that
time, but he had learnt to take any job available. If you
get a job, work harder than you are expected to do, and be ready to put in
longer hours if need be – whether you will get extra pay or not – you will be
training yourself to work and building a reputation that will always be useful.
So these are a few suggestions to think over. The
world does not owe you a living. You have to make a place for yourself.
Good luck!
