Early this week, a colleague I was chatting with asked me what I planned to write today. I had no idea, and told her so.
My answer is what prompted her to tell me about a friend of hers who constantly badmouths her “rich” relatives for refusing to – as this colleague put it – hook her up with a job.
Apparently, this young woman had two relatives who are managing directors of certain major organisations, but for reasons she can’t fathom, they have “refused” to give her a job.
This brought to mind someone who, some years back, had complained to me about her well-to-do aunt who lives in this huge house with a swimming pool, yet her siblings, one of whom was her mother, were struggling to make ends meet.
I remember asking her, half serious, whether she expected her rich aunt to take them all in.
This friend’s “struggling” mother, mind you, had managed to educate her up to university, and she and her four siblings, now adults, had never gone hungry, slept in the cold, or lacked clothes to wear.
I’d been to their home, and they lived in a decent house, somewhere you would be proud to invite your friends or future in-laws to. Yet she still begrudged her wealthy aunt of what she perceived as a privileged lifestyle, one she thought she should share with her relatives.
This annoying sense of entitlement, if you asked me, is our undoing, and is what holds many of us back from achieving our full potential.
It is also what discourages many from assisting their relatives. I say this because I know someone who had the nerve to badmouth an uncle who had housed him for three years while he studied for his degree.
This uncle, who had three children to look after and provide for, not only gave him shelter and fed him, he also gave him fare to and from school.
This man finally graduated and got a job, but what is upsetting is the fact that, instead of being grateful, all he remembers of those three years is the fact that his uncle’s wife once packed him sweet potatoes for lunch.
I wondered what was wrong with having sweet potatoes for lunch – true, you will get a serious case of choking if you took them without tea or whatever you prefer, but a beggar cannot be a chooser, can he? What did he want his host to pack him? Roast chicken? Grilled steak, baked potatoes and a side garden salad?
I still wonder what this ungrateful man would have said had he been sent off that morning on an empty stomach.
As you can imagine, this relative, who was kind enough to welcome him into his home when he had no one else to turn to, is now considered selfish and inconsiderate by this man’s relatives. Would you blame him if he never did a kind deed to a relative again?
The fact is that we cannot all have swimming pools in our backyards, nor can we all afford to eat meat every day.
But does this mean that our neighbours should leave their gates open so that we can take a dip in their pools whenever we feel like?
Does it mean we should invite ourselves over to their house for supper whenever we smell chapati from their side of the fence?
