Where Girls Go Wrong by Joe Mwangi is a good book that every girl should rise and read. In pages 12-13, there is a hilarious dialogue between a teacher and his students. It is worth sharing. For somewhere I read, sharing is caring.
Teacher: James, who do you want to be in future?
James: I would like to be a wealthy man. A great tycoon that will own houses in Dubai, Kenya and South Africa. I would like to own several vehicles, each for a day. I want to have great influence like the ability to be a kingmaker.
Teacher: James, it is a very good dream. You need to work extra hard in school and in life in order to touch it.
Teacher: Okay, and Jane, what would you like to be?
Jane: I would like to be the wife of James.
That is where girls go wrong.
Sadly, we are born and brought up in a society that disregards women, yet womenfolk too, are sometimes co-authors of their own misfortunes. Then, most girls though endowed with great potential, end up as average escorts in life. Instead of going far, most girls go too near, but in many places. That is where girls go wrong. Then, there is the story of the 44th POTUS. One glad day President Barrack Hussein Obama and his beloved wife Michelle decided to do something bizarre. They decided to go out for a casual dinner in a nearby restaurant. They sat down to tour their hearts, pinch pangs of hunger, and escort the sun to unset. The owner of the restaurant asked the President’s Secret Service if he could first have a tete-a-tete with the First Lady. They quickly obliged, and so Michelle had a brief conversation with the owner of the restaurant. President Obama later asked his nearest dearest what the restaurateur went to tell her. Michelle mentioned that in some years back, they were madly in love. President Obama then replied. Therefore, in case the man had married Michelle, then she would be the owner of the restaurant. Michelle responded with a resounding no. If the man had married her, he would be the President of United States. There, Michelle did not go wrong.
What is the moral of the anecdote? This tale is didactic. All girls need to understand that a woman is not a shadow of a man. A wife is not a knife used to slice vegetables. Some female folk have eventually decided to agree to play as the second fiddle in life. That is where girls go wrong. Some of our sisters are not losers, but winners who have not discovered that they can win. When promised heaven, a girl forgets even her moniker. She follows on harping lines and lyrics of the silly song, ‘This Must Be Love’. They only find out later, it was nothing but exploitation. The ‘lover’ was only on an adventurous trip as a trickster hunting for a dupe, a gullible girl. Most girls never learn anything from such terrible twists and turns of fate. When another adventurer bolts from the blues, and promises her heaven, she gives in swiftly like whistling wisps of wind, and lo and behold, the same episode replays like magic made of music. Later, in the evening of her life, as the sun forms the beautiful orb, turns brown, then goes down, the girl comes back to her senses. She wakes up from slumber after a wanton wastage. That is where girls go wrong.
Some girls do not know. That there are things that are urgent but not important. Likewise, there are things that are important but not urgent. Some girls are busy like buzzing bees, doing the right things at the wrong time. That is where girls go wrong.
In mixed schools, it is even worse. A girl will refuse to respond to a question in class because she fears to make a fool of herself. She fears to get embarrassed because her ‘husband’ sits in close range. In such settings, students are prone to coupling and the class becomes a ‘couple seminar’. Girls engage in premarital sex, ‘accidentally’ become pregnant, drop out of school, hence they lose their focus and bearing in life. That is where girls go wrong.
There is this story about a farmer. He was suffering from ‘Stupidity Complex’. One day he looked up the tree at the unripen mango and thought to himself, ‘I can’t wait until they are ripen.’ Therefore, he climbed up the tree and pulled a branch closer until the mangoes were at a close range. He munched one mango and thought to himself, ‘When it ripens, I will come back to pick it officially.’ He descended from the tree smiling sheepishly and laughing doltishly, as he masticated a chunk of the unripen mango. He felt that he was smarter than other farmers who ‘never knew’ how to eat mangoes when they are still on the trees. No wonder, a fool says, ‘I am wise’. A few weeks elapsed as if late for a flight. The farmer returned to pick the mango, and you can guess what he found. The mango was rotten and stinking. The farmer got it all wrong.
This is the interpretation of this short story. The farmer is the teenager who plunges headlong into affairs and exposes herself into wanton waste and wild sexual sprees. This, in turn, foments trouble. It ruins things. It eats the future, and there is no doubt, it will be a stinking future because at that point, life will never be the same again. Thousands of girls make their future blank, bleak and black because of eating mangoes before time. That is where girls go wrong.
If there is no enemy inside, the enemy outside can do you no harm. Again, the hyena can only enter the compound using the hole created by the family dog. Most girls have made themselves their own enemies due to what I call the tinge of jealousy. Accumulating love brings luck, but accumulating hatred brings calamity. Jealousy is an acid that does more to the vessel in which it is stored than on anything in which it enters. That is why in some girls’ schools, ulcers is a common disease. Such schools buy ulcer medicine in 20 litres jericans. Some girls are deluded. They think they can go up by pulling others down. That is where girls go wrong.
Every time you choose to give someone ten of your minutes, remember that you are giving them part of your life, a chunk of your life you will never recover. A counsellor once put it this way: abortion does not make a girl pregnant, but it makes her the mother of a dead child. They say experience is the best teacher. Some girls think that this must be their experience. Yet, it can be a long wrong experience. That is where girls go wrong.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it becomes good food to the predator. Likewise, every morning a lion wakes up, it knows it must outrun the lowest gazelle or it will starve to death. That is what Charles Darwin called ‘Survival for the Fittest’. It does not matter whether you are the lion or gazelle. When the sun wakes up from its deep sleep in the eastern horizon, you must start running. When you do what you have to do, God will do what he has to do. Dr. Ben Carson said, “Do your best and God will do the rest.” If you do not go after what you want, you will never have it. If you do not ask, the answer will always be no. If you do not step forward, you will always be in the same place. Ironically, some women think that the world needs to treat them with ultimate care. That they are delicate like glass. Therefore, they generate a false feeling that the world owes them. That is where girls go wrong.
Women are good in multi-tasking. They beat men in this area big time. But it is this advantage that becomes their ultimate disadvantage. Some girls think they can be in school and at home at the same time. That is why some of them have the ability and capacity to be present yet absent. That is where girls go wrong.
People know what to do, but the truth is; people never do what they know. Most girls have the fear to attempt big things not because they cannot, but because they think that it is not girls’ thing. When girls are young, sometimes they become fearful, and when they grow up, they never break off. That is where girls go wrong.
Out here, there are girls suffering from what Erick Erickson (Psychologist) termed as ‘Identity Crisis’. These girls do not know that imitation is limitation. Low self-esteem makes a slightly long nose feel long. It will make your ears feel abnormally big. It is the feeling that makes tall girls to walk short and hunched; instead of walking heads held high. Girls need to understand this. Value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see it. The strength and stamina of water is its inability to be un-shattered by a hammer or wounded by a knife. The strongest sword in the world cannot scar its surface. A warrior at times behaves like the water of a river flowing despite the obstacle she encounters. She only focuses on the destination — the sea. The problem is that some girls do not know that even if you do not see value in a thousand shilling note, it does not become a hundred. That is where girls go wrong.
The reviewer is an editor, author and peripatetic public speakers.
By Victor Ochieng’
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