ARE SSENGAS RELEVANT IN THE DOT COM ERA?

I attended my first bridal shower today. A cousin of a friend is getting married soon and the only reason why I tagged along is because they mentioned that there would be a ssenga session. I had learned in my history and social studies lessons that the ssenga was a very important person to the marriage because she was the one responsible for making the girl grow up into the woman that she should be; but most especially into an acceptable wife. I have a ssenga….well, most of us actually do. But in this day and age it seems like their cultural role in our lives has very slowly dwindled away. So much that some people have to go to the extent of hiring a professional ssenga to take the girl through what she should do in her marriage; but most especially in her marital bed.

I have heard about their inept discussions quite elusively from friends and was curious to find out for myself how deep these talks really go. So I sat, and listened. There were a lot of ohs and ahs going around the room as she told us things that we probably never imagined or had ever heard of; deep cultural things that this era of sex tapes and sex toys has slowly faded off…things that, if you really thought about, made a whole lot of sense. Don’t get me wrong, some of the things probably do not apply to this generation where people are trying too hard to be and act anything but African but most of what she said made sense. Most of what she said got me thinking about how we try so hard to copy the western ways of marriage and then wonder why our marriages don’t last long. (try and compare the divorce rates of our parents and the one of the people in the western world)

So, are SSengas really relevant in this day and age? I think they are; more than we can imagine. Especially in this so called dot com era where people would rather seek counsel on their marriage from their single best friend than from a family member.

I was looking at the different girls around and one thing I actually appreciated was the fact that everyone was being given a chance to learn;to ask questions. Taking in mind the fact that most of us may go into marriage without the slightest idea about our African culture,(and hence be unable to pass it on to our children) the fact that these ssenga sessions are meetings of not only the bride and her ssenga but rather the whole bridal entourage is a big plus.

Another even more important thing about them is apart from our botanical name and the villages that we visit twice a year, this is one other thing that we get to do to honor our roots. Of course, as a Christian woman, most of the practices that were spoken about may not apply to me but the knowledge of my past and the culture they had is something that I can be able to tell my children about and respect in some applicable aspects.

I am not sure if the gentlemen have ‘kojjas’ serving the same purpose that the ssengas serve for the woman. But I am surely glad that that was a part of our culture that we have not lost with the excessive westernization. Sure, it may be a little diluted but thank God it still exists.

crazy love....

As she leaned in and kissed him gently on the cheek, he took hold of the frame of her face, looked her square in the eyes and said,’I am crazy about you’ pronouncing each word as if it were glass. The corners of her mouth curved into what should have been a smile but appeared much more glorious in his eyes. Her eyes darted down but her long silk eyelashes carried them firmly back to gaze into his. ‘ I love you like crazy. Sometimes I am scared that I love you so much I would literally do anything for you’….

That’s when I stopped thinking of them as romantic and looked back into the book I had actually gone there to read( plus, come to think of it, I must have started looking like a crazy person just sitting there at the table opposite them, staring…..) crazy love. Psht. I have come to learn that we are all capable of some sort of craziness and when you add love to the mix of that, then it becomes something else; much more harmful to self. Allow me to illustrate. I know of a girl who loved this guy ‘like crazy’. She is probably the most logical person that I know. She has a firm head on her shoulders and sometimes I wonder if she has two brains inside her skull( not that her head is big but she is really smart) so it came as a surprise when she narrated her love saga to me. She loved this guy. They had been together for 2 years. Although Lord knows how! The guy was a total douche. He slept around quite openly. When he got caught he told her he had a problem and needed a break to sort himself out, which she willingly gave him with a return ticket. He basically treated her like she was scum; think of the worst thing a person can do to someone they claim to love and this guy probably did it twice. But she was crazy about him. She said things like, ‘I know I should leave him but I don’t know, I just love him so much. I mean sometimes I swear he makes me feel like I am losing my mind!’

Crazy love: the kind of love that makes you act insane. Some people yearn for that kind of love. Me? No thank you. You see movies and media and all these fictional books have led us to believe that love is only like a fire. Burning fiercely and consuming all of us(but mainly our mental faculties) they paint the picture that true love needs to make you lose your very senses and most of the time will get you rolling on the floor in tears asking yourself why the hell you still love him even though he just cut your lip with the back of his hand for the umpteenth time. Don’t get me wrong. Crazy love and unconditional love are two very different things that are too often mistaken to be the same. Crazy love says I will ride to the end of the earth with you no matter what the cost. Unconditional love says  no matter where you are in this world, I will still love you the same. Probably not the best analogy to use here but go with it.

 Crazy love is sad. Especially because it has you questioning yourself and realizing that you would never do this in any other circumstances. Like I said. I want none of that.

I want me a love that nourishes. The kind of love where you wake up in the morning feeling and knowing that you are a better person, a stronger person. The kind of love that makes you see the future when you look in the mirror; a future that is bright and happy and sometimes sweaty from all the work this love inspires you to do. I want a love that’s sane; awakening. The kind that shocks you back to reality every time that you are about to do something crazy and stupid.

I want a real love. A love that I don’t have to be delusional about. The kind I can feel and see and even test against empirical standards and find to be true. You see, people tell you that the guy who looks at you in a certain dress and tells you you look fat in it must be crazy. But I want that. A true love. A love that is not molded out of some societal clay to be appropriate to those therein; open the door for her, pull her seat out, buy her chocolates and roses on valentine’s day. I mean all of the above would be really nice bonuses but I want him to do things he thought of in his head not stuff he saw in a movie or read from a book. You see, I believe in the creator of love and I know he created a mind of creativity and endless possibilities inside of each of our heads.

I want a love that lasts. the kind that sees the past for what it is but doesn’t choose to ignore it as if it were something that could never come back to haunt us. Instead, this love deals with it, tears down its foundation and builds a stronger, more lasting one. You see this love does not take with it the growth it brought if or when it leaves. No, this love has a permanent mark on your life because it hasn’t made you into the person it wants you to be, rather, it has shaped you into the person you were meant to be.

I guess, all I really wanted to say was, looking at that couple opposite me, I felt no envy or desire towards their position. What they had or felt may have been something that worked for them quite well. Rather, I felt contentment. Daily, I realize that I have the love I have always wanted. The kind of love that fills you up and leaves you feeling fulfilled. (repetition intended)

LIFE OH LIFE.....

Today has been a dull day.no. a bad day. For some reason the beginning of this blog feels like a diary entry but stay with me. It isn’t. today has been one of those days when you have such a bad day that you don’t even have the mental energy to fully acknowledge how terrible a day it really is. The kind of day when you are on auto pilot; wake up, drag your feet to the bathroom, take a shower, drag yourself back to bed and force upon yourself a slumber that will hopefully last through at least half of the day.(the nap was actually the best part of my day) anyway, amidst the suffocating feeling of how much of a vacuum my day was, I found some time to think; to ponder. I thought about the quality of my days of late. Of how stuck in a rut my life had started to feel and how much I hate routine. Don’t get me wrong. This is not one of those times where people whine about how boring their lives are of late yet they are not doing anything to change them. No, I have been doing literally everything to change but somehow it feels like the doors just won’t open; as if I forgot the password to sesame and my repetition of different recitations just locks it even tighter.

So somewhere between my naps, I thought about something someone wise had earlier told me. ‘what if God wants you to learn something that you just aren’t? what if you feel stuck in that place because there is a lesson you just aren’t getting right?’ At the moment he said it, I didn’t really want to hear it. I was pouring my heart out to him and simply wanted him to hold me and tell me everything would be okay, not be my guru. Well ,I guess, not getting what we want can be a good thing too. Anyway, hours later, I got to thinking( and praying) and I realized that that wise man just might be right.

The school of life is not just a metaphor, I think it is a reality. We don’t just exist and breathe for the sake of being a statistic in the growing population of the homo sapiens. We have a purpose and every purpose has a plan. A carefully pre-designed blue print to our destiny. Now life being a school means we are going to have to take a whole lot of tests. And just like in school, we can’t progress to the next class if we don’t pass that exam or that test or if we never learned that lesson. I like to think of life as one huge staircase. We need the previous step to get to the next one; we need whatever lesson we will learn in one phase of our lives as equipment for the next phase of our lives.

That inadvertently led me to think of something else. The teacher/headmaster. GOD. I think that if life is a school then God is the principal, the teacher, the headmaster; basically the one who equips us with whatever we need to move to the next part of our lives. Sometimes we want to rush through the school and finish a certain stage before our time. But I am grateful that in his love and according to his perfect timing, God holds us in place. He knows how important certain lessons are for us so he only lets us go forward once we have learned that lesson. He of course, teaches us( in different ways) but sometimes in our stubbornness, we refuse to learn.

Now like the staircase that life feels to me, that also led me to think about something else. HOW GRATEFUL I AM for today. I know. It has been a totally bad day. But I have learned today, a lesson I wish I had learned many months ago. I have learned( or rather been reminded) that there is nothing that happens in my life just fwaa( I apologize for the colloquialism. I have always wanted to use that word in writing; without self-restraint) and for that I am grateful. I learned so many little lessons today one of which was how God has got my back. No matter how it may seem, IT WILL ALL BE OKAY. But I couldn’t see all this without first embracing a thankful heart. Gratitude was the lense through which I saw the different little lessons that warmed my heart today. So in a way, I am grateful for gratitude.

The rain may not always bring with it a rainbow but one thing is for sure, somewhere something is being brought to life by the pouring of that rain.

THE BAD BOY SYNDROME

Today at office a short lived debate began about the already tired topic on how the bad boy always seems to get the girl. Most of the blame was on the girl of course. You know, because ultimately women are not prey who are chased and caught by some predator. Women are human beings with working brains (or so they say) and ability to use the God given gift of free will. now, some of the ladies did highlight the fact that sometimes when in a relationship with a ‘bad boy’ you know what he is doing to you is wrong but you feel like you are under some spell you can’t get out of; there was some misuse of the cliché about love being blind.
The left side of my brain is dying to state how that is plain stupidity and give some logical explanation about how we subconsciously make up excuses to keep something in our lives, no matter how harmful it is to us because of a certain personal hollow we are desperately trying to fill. BUT experience defeats logic in this case because I have ever been one of those girls. I know what it feels like to believe that you have been cursed to love this terrible person and to think the universe is punishing you for that time that really nice guy asked you out but you didn’t say yes cause of peer pressure. But that should probably be a story for another day(hey look I just got another idea for the 7 day blog challenge) back to the topic; why do we fall for bad boys?
Now with the years of theoretical and a bit of practical psychology that I have been exposed to (oh, how modest of me) I know that one of the major reasons why we fall for bad boys is because we have one of two complexes. Either we have a mother complex (a mother will love her child no matter how evil he or she turns out to be) or the heroine complex, thinking we can save him. Truth is, most girls who get into relationships with bad boys (knowing very well who and what they are capable of) are just plain vain and egotistical. They carry around a false humility and tell themselves that if they love him enough and take his crap, he will love them back and change for them.
But someone did bring up another reason why we put our hands in the lion’s mouth and hope it doesn’t bite; because it looks cool.  Most bad boys take a lot of time to ensure that they look ‘new and shiny’. And girls, like the inner leprachauns that we are, jump at the sight of new and shiny. Especially because of the attention it brings. Every girl at some point in her life has fed on attention.( even those who end up as loaners usually do that because they were probably denied attention at some point in their lives) we love the drama and the thrill that being with a bad boy brings; the endless stories that we will have for our girlfriends; the roller coaster ride that relationship is bound to be.
But truthfully, not all the credit can go to the ladies. I have met a good number of what we would generally categorize as a bad boy and I must say that most of these boys know how to play their game right. You know that trance like feeling I mentioned in the beginning? These guys know how to manipulate every fibre of their beings so that we are hypnotized by something as small as a well-timed and properly curved smile.
Oh, bad boys can be good. Quite good at what they do. But after all is said and done, girls really do get tired of the charades. And when they do, they find a good guy. So, even though the bad boys seem to get the girls at first, the good boys always finish last. And you know that adage about laughing last…..

on memories not forgotten about younger days....

I was sitting here thinking back on how old I have grown(not that I will ever admit to being too old. Society cannot allow us to just enjoy the fact that we as women can be happily a certain age) so I tried to dig deep into the well of memories that my life has collected and wanted to think on the ones that I treasured the most. Somehow my mind fell upon the days when my heart was wild and my hormones were acceptably volatile-my teenage days; my high school days. I guess we all have some sort of memory of our high school experience and I am almost too sure that there are things that we did that we would probably never do at this age. Now since the bloggers’ challenge is for seven days, I figured I should present a list of seven. We all have our own lists. Here is mine; My favorite memories about high school; in no particular order.

     

 1.SONG BOOKS; Yes. I had more than one of those. Filled from cover to cover with lyrics and beautifully decorated with colourful drawings and lots of glitter. I do not know what it was about collecting song lyrics that made us feel cool but I jumped on that train and rode it high and proud until my very later years. I am not sure if the newspapers caught this trend from us or they were the ones who started it but conveniently so, they always had a cut out with song lyrics in the Sunday paper. My father was very proud of me when I begged him for the newspaper and insisted that he carry it on visitation days probably thinking that current affairs was my fancy; not knowing that I was collecting lyrics to songs I already knew by heart. Lyrics I was going to busy myself copying or gluing to the books that he spent his hard earned money buying for me to copy notes in. well, I guess those could also be called notes. Musical notes.

2.       ‘APPETTA’ ; also infamously known to most people as APPETIZER. In simple terms it was a cooked mixture of a lot of oil and spices that we added to our food during every meal. I am still in shock that we consumed so much oil in so few years. some people would carry as much as 5 litres of oil per term; which would be refilled every visitation day with another 5 litres. (notice I do not call it appetta. Detachment issues I guess. Appetta was heaven to us but when you realize that it was actually a lot of spiced cooking oil, you can’t help but think, WHAT THE HELL?!?!)

  

3.       DANCE GROUPS; almost every corner had these. It was cool to be part of a group that choreographs and presents ‘unique’ and cool dance strokes in front of the whole school(or another school if you are lucky to get on the list) or is even able to present the dance strokes exactly the way they were in that music video. I loved the dance group I was in.

§  MIMING; I decided to put this under dance groups because they sort of are all under performance. Luckily the schools that I went to never had the stomach for mimes as much as other schools but that in no way meant we were not accepting of them. Even embracing. Literally. Like when boys from SMACK, BUDO or NGO came to present a song by an overrated boy band and threw roses to us. I must confess, watching those boys on stage did give us shivers. the good kind (notice I mentioned names of schools. To this day I believe the names of the schools had a firmer grip on our minds-and  hearts-than the boys therein.)

  

4.      VISITS; no. not visitation days. Yes, those were much looked forward to but not as much as the visits from the other gender. See I had the privilege of being in  single girls’ schools for all the six years of my high school and the minute we had the slightest information that our ‘husbands’ were visiting, the school went into an untold frenzy forever indescribable to people who had never experienced this. I wasn’t much of a social bird in those years but I enjoyed going to dorm just to awe at how much people can transform in so little time at the mere announcement of a visitation from a certain school. Do take note, there were some schools that visited and it was no big deal; There was no need to borrow the skirt of a form one student for that. But there were schools that visited and it felt like even the headmistresses were thrown into a feat to ensure that they were pleased with what they found.

5.      ASSEMBLY PRESENTATIONS; this one I was actually quite grateful for because it equipped me with public speaking skills but that was not the part of the memory that I am fond of. I remember we had to rehearse days before with a song and dance routine that we would present to the entire school as entertainment during what was usually a very boring assembly. Good times,though. Funny times.

6.       SLEEPING POSITIONS IN CLASS; the irony of even having sleeping positions in class is something to probably write about on another day. But we all had them. For particular lessons, of course. Like geography. Why oh why did I study about the Swiss Alps?!?! Anyway, back to positions. Some people were privileged enough to have tinted glasses that they would sleep behind without the teacher ever noticing. The rest of us, had to be much more creative. I was a back bencher and sat right next to the person at the corner. We were blessed because this corner was a blind spot for the teachers at the front especially if they sat next to the door; which they usually did. Sitting in the back was fun because people went as far as lying down on the ground without the teacher as much as noticing that they were not in class. This is why teachers should be the most celebrated people in our country.

7.    

   Last but definitely not least. 

7    7. THE EXCITEMENT OF RECEIVING A LETTER. It didn’t really matter from whom it was. Just walking up to the information prefect after she read your name out was a blissful feeling. Even though we could open them in silence and secret( like they are supposed to have been opened) somehow, opening the letter in front of an audience was the preferred route. So we waited for prep(after endlessly bickering about how that ka guy had finally written back), gathered our friends and opened the letter…this letter, if it was from that ka guy, would then be shared with the rest of the group. Now even though the letter that ka guy wrote specifically for one person could be shared by the whole group, this did not and should never be mistaken to mean the ka guy was also to be shared.

As I went through this list, I realized that there are actually so many other memories about high school worth writing about like;

Ø  the awesomeness of being in school clubs like Scripture Union and debate club (both of which shaped my life a lot…the former more than the latter);

Ø  the memory of seeing people store chicken that was brought on visitation day up to weeks after (how food poisoning escaped these people is still beyond me!)

Ø  oh, and the sneaking in of food that wasn’t accepted in school. I should note that in one of the schools I went to, food or ‘grub’ was not allowed. It was one thing for us, the students to try and sneak in that box of cookies or powdered milk as we were coming to school but my gosh hearing your parents tell you how they were able to sneak food past the askari(who by the way was just the worst! Dude would check the car for food like your child’s last name was the kind that is stereotyped to be part of those who make things go kaboom.) I remember once, my crazy uncle sneaked in one of the smaller snacks in his socks just so he could look back at the askari with the ‘huh, bet you didn’t think to check there’ look! He got them out very happily and presented them to me and I was thinking, ‘haha. Wait, you seriously want me to eat these?’

Ø  our language. No, I am not talking about the way young people seem to find it cool to use profanity. I am referring to how we managed to make slang an actual language so much that it became confusing what was the right word. Like the use of the word like in every sentence…oh but it got even more interesting. In one of my high schools, we created our own language; a whole other dialect with its own words and all that. It was pretty cool because the teachers never knew what we were talking about.

I guess the list really is endless, as they tend to say. I would most definitely want to go back to those days; days when I was ripe with youth. Oh, how I would love to be that age again, mostly because like I told you in the beginning, society just can’t let us women happily be a certain age…and that certain age is knocking firmly at my door!