From age twelve I have lived by my high school’s motto “Hard work yields good results”. Whatever I am working on, if I work hard at it, I am almost always successful. This is especially true for academic work, where if you study hard you will be able to pass your exams.
Does that mean that when we fail to reach our goals, we have not worked hard enough?
Recently one of favourite bloggers, Fungai tweeted this:
I love Fungai because she always writes things I have no courage to write or say. Whenever she writes her articles, she draws you in and forces you to see things in a way you would never think of. In this instance I imagined how she must have felt someone telling her how poor people are lazy. I imagine she was angry because that is what I felt too.
Zimbabwe has gone through a lot in the past fifteen years. The rich keep getting richer and the poor getting poorer. When I last went home I visited friends and family who are on both spectrums. It was like being in different countries. While others were able to afford holidays overseas, others were struggling to pay $20 school fees.
I do not blame the rich for being rich or even get jealous. What I do not agree with is the rich thinking the poor are poor because they are lazy. There are some lazy rich people too!
Most African women work very hard just to feed their family. Most wake up early in the morning to fetch water, firewood and work their fields. They hardly make any money doing their everyday chores so they will never be rich even though they work very hard.
Source: Planeterra.org
I respect these women because it is what my grandmothers had to do to send their children to school and clothe them. It is because of their hard work that my parents were able to give me a better life than they did.
My mother is a nurse and my father a retired policeman. Important jobs but my parents were never going to be rich doing that. There are many people who wanted to have what we had as a family but compared to the Warren Buffets of this world my parents are poor. That does not mean that they are lazy compared to Warren Buffet.
We should stop using money and material things as a measure of success and be content with what we have. If you become successful and make a bucketload of cash, good for you. Perhaps use some of your money and influence to help those without. Offer opportunities to those who do not have them.
We all have a role to play in the communities in which we live. Some roles are bigger than and seemingly more important than others. We all need each other in this world.