Operation ndigadzirisei

"We were made to love and be loved
But the price this world demands will cost you far too much
I spent so many years just trying to fit in
Now I've found a place in this circle of friends"
~from Circle of Friends by Point of Grace~

Clemencia's last comment on the last article inspired me to write this one.
It occurred to me that most of the time friends omit telling each other the
truth about each other's bad points for fear of annoying each other and
destroying the friendship. In so doing we let each other fail in life's issues
yet had we corrected each other success would have been a given. I
therefore decided to use this particular article to make my friends
tell me about my weaknesses and how they affect others. I want to use their
comments to improve my personality and so I urge them to be very frank with me
and feel free to say whatever they want, I won't feel insulted and it won't strain our friendship. The motive behind improving my personality is so that I am the kind of person who everyone wants to be neighbors with to the extend that property values go up when I am in the neighborhood. Just kidding!!! On a more serious note I need to use the comments whilst working on my relationship with my soulmate.

Most of us are probably allured by the attractive notion that effortless
relationships exist. Whether it be happily-ever-after marriages, or friendships
which last forever, or parent/child bonds which supercede the need to
understand each other, we'd all like to believe that our most intimate
relationships are unconditional, and strong enough to withstand whatever may
come. However, at some point in our lives most of us need to face the fact that
relationships require effort to keep them strong and positive, and that even
wonderful, strong relationships can be destroyed by neglect. So this article
is meant to point to me the parts of my personality that I need to
work on for me to enjoy lasting love-filled, peaceful and happy relationships.

A special thanks to my circle of friends. I appreciate your friendship and support.

A tesitmony of love of all kinds

Not a day goes by that I don't think about it.
What it means to love and be happy. I see it all around me.
Men and women basking in happiness to be with one another.
On occasion, I see that love can survive in all possible situations
and combinations. It just makes me marvel at the beauty and
power of love.

Chipo and Dave are a couple whose love for each other I admire.
Their love story unravelled right in front of my eyes and it fascinates
me to see them still strong together many years later.
 Chipo was the girl next door to Dave and they were friends since the 
first grade and through high school. They went to the same University.
Chipo was a beautiful girl and dated some man she met at Uni and Dave 
dated some nurse. But the one he wanted was the one he could not have,
Chipo. He was always there for her and she was there for him. Best friends.
But they were never more than that.....until the day Dave had an accident
and almost died. That's when in a delirious state he confessed his true
feelings to Chipo. Chipo was shocked. She had always loved Dave but would
not show it because she thought he didn't love her the same. She was surprised
to find out that he actually loved her all along. In the hospital, Chipo had
told him her plans of getting engaged to her current boyfriend. He was hurt but
wanted her to be happy because she was his friend and a good person. Her
happiness mattered to him a whole lot. Dave recovered from his injuries and
went home. He was thankful to be alive. Imagine his surprise when he came home
to find Chipo there waiting for him with a surprise engagement proposal. Dave 
looked at the woman she had called her friend for two decades and wept with joy as
he accepted the proposal. While Dave was in hospital Chipo had spent a lot of time
thinking and realized that the man she wanted, the one she sought to embrace for the rest of her life had been right under her nose all along. That night, Dave and
Chipo shared their love, and more, much more, they began to share the rest of their lives. A month later they were married and their love for each other is given as an example of how beautiful marriage can be by the marriage counselors at their Church.

I also have a friend, Clemencia who is very intelligent but very quiet. Clemencia has
always been the nerd type, forever studying whatever subject under the sun. As she grew up she had no time for anything else besides her books to the point of being anti-social and dressing shabbily, she just didn't care about anything except her books. Was always top of her class from first grade up to her last year at University and during all those years she never dated anyone and only made friends with one person, Seby, who accepted her as she was. After graduating with a distinction she got a good well paying job and then started attending an MBA programme during weekends where she met her match, Tendai, an anti-social nerd who is obssessed with books, just like herself. He was a gentle, shy person. They became very close friends. After two months of friendship, he saw her in a different light.
She did have all the qualities he wanted in a significant other and they started dating. Clemencia the nerd became a changed person when she fell in love with Tendai, she began to take great care of her looks and would actually make time to be with other girls and participate in the girl talks something she never used to be interested in. After a year of dating, Clemencia and Tendai got married and their love for each other can be seen by anyone who knows them, two decades down the line.
Their love for each other knows no bounds.

The there is my friend Agnes. Agnes is a pretty girl. All men and boys can't sit or stand still when she is around and she loves the attention she gets from men but never lets them get near her. After divorcing with her irresponsible first husband
she began to believe that all men were only interested in her outer beauty and not with her inner beauty. As beautiful as she is, she never dated anyone after her divorce, didnt trust men. But the man that she eventually married for the second time had no time for dating, it was love at first sight. He gazed at her in awe from across a crowded room at a business luncheon and the next day and for the next two months after that a fresh single red rose with a note written, "Love you Agnes|" and signed TG would be delivered to her desk by a florist every morning. She didn't know any TG and this TG was not coming forward to introduce himself to her so for two months she lived in suspense and anticipation to meet this TG. When he eventually appeared into her life and proposed Agnes had already fallen in love with him during the build up of the anticipation to meet the romantic TG so she accepted his proposal. A month later they were married and they are still married
and strongly in love to this date.

These are the testimonies of love and I have seen these love tales unfolding as I watched from a distance. Whenever I am alone, and that is fairly often, these tales give me hope. Hope that someday I am going to be writing my own "and they lived happily ever after" love story with Dumi as my co-star on this blog. Will also write Babra's love story in future when she eventually meets her soulmate.

To all those people out there who are in love like I am, what I want to say to you is that it takes courage to love and relationships of any kind take work but if your love is true it can overcome any obstacles in its path and become stronger with each obstacle it manages to surmount.
THANK YOU LORD FOR THE GIFT OF LOVE.

Write your own original life script

Most of us are living according to scripts written by
other people, we are not original. We act not according
to how we really want to but according to how the society
we live in expect us to act, how our peers act or what
was instilled into our minds as we grew up or what the book
says. We are more concerned about conformity than about
being ourselves.

Conformity is a kind of mental slavery that restricts us
and hinders us from being creative. It makes us give up
fully utilising the gift of thinking that God gave us
humans by detering us from coming up with our own original
ideas because it causes us to think within the box always.
Conformity stumps our growth through entreprenuer
initiatives.

All inventions in the world comes from those who dare to go
against conformity and think differently. All progress
came from those who chose to question the status quo and
dared to be themselves by writing their own original life
scripts and living according to that script. 

In order to have extraordinary success you need to have a
questioning mind that is also action oriented as well  as that is
mentally emancipated from fear of non-conformity, prejudice,
defeatism and negative thinking.  You also need to be first in
something. Realise that you are a unique individual with a
unique arsenal of talents that no other person possesses and
you have your own mix of capabilities that you need to contribute
to the world which are different from everyone else's so refuse to
act like a clone of another person. Make your own permanent
mark in the world today by boldly going where no one else has
gone before and this you can only do if you dare to go against
conformity. Of course you'll face ridicule and sometimes loneliness
as you try to be different but make sure that that doesn't make you
sacrifice your success to appease society, your peers or whoever was
mentally enslaving you to conformity. Transform rather than conform.

Unfortunately our Zimbabwean culture over emphasises conformity
and this creates a serious mental hurdle in the fast changing global
village where one has to either innovate or face extinction. I
personally think that it is this over-rating of normalcy in our
Zimbabwean culture that causes us to be so passive instead of daring
to think differently and come up with solutions to our  economic
situation.
The current economic situation in Zimbabwe requires that we
think differently for us to cause a positive transformation
of it. We should challenge existing mindsets and question
current economic policies and practices  which brought us this
 far down in the economic ladder and encourage creativity and
change. If the conventional wisdom of sticking to tried and 
tested economic policies and using them to solve our economic
problems is not working for us  then what we need to do is chart
our own economic revolutionary future by identifying the best
solution for our particular economic situation. Conforming
to conventional wisdom can be a constraint on the free fall
of ideas that is neccessary for the economic turnaround
that we badly need in this country.

True peace and happiness comes about if we dare ourselves
to be our true selves not what someone else wants us to be.

Everything is possible to him who believes.

I am a bookworm, an avid reader, a web surfer, a researcher,
I just love acquiring knowledge but the last two days after I
came back from our shopping trip I didn't touch my laptop or
 touch any book, didn't go to work, just treated myself to bubble
baths, watching movies on TV and helping my little daughter do
her homework. It was so refreshing. One thing I just could not
stop doing was to think about issues in life and of course my love
Dumi.

I thought about how we Zimbos have mastered the blaming game,
against a backdrop of doom, despair and defeatism caused by the
economic situation in our country. We blame just about anyone else
except ourselves. Just look around you, have any of our problems 
vanished as a result of our expertise at blaming. When you blame
you actually transfer the responsibility of resolving your challenges
to someone else. By completely absolving yourself from the matter
you are abdicating responsibility. That is why blaming is so 
disempowering.

What really hurts is that it doesn't have to be this way. We have the
brains, the capacity, the means & the resources to turn the tables.
All that we are missing is either the sight or the successful 
implementation of our good ideas. We can make this place economically
sound if we have a strong unshakeable belief in our capabilities as
individuals and as a nation. This is the kind of empowering ourselves
that Bob Marley sang, "None but ourselves can free our minds" and
Mahtma Gandi put it as, "Be the change that you want to see in the
world" but most awesome of all is the qoutation from the bible which
says, "Everything is possible to him who believes." We can cause a
paradigm shift in the situation in this country if we believe in
ourselves and our capabilities.

Have you ever thought of sitting down and pondering at what future
generations  will inherit from our era- poverty, corruption, nepotism,
the black market, profiteering outside the laws of economics and 
commerce, infrastructural  and institutional decay, xenophobia, greed,
 the art of blaming and lies and more lies.
I pondered about it and it inspired me to write this article.

Far-fetched reporting

This weekend I had a hectic trip to a neighbouring country
to do some shopping so as to replenish my pantry which had become
empty. It was an uneventful trip but what disturbed me was the news
I heard about Zimbabwe when I was there. The radio news reader said
that some Zimbabweans had resorted to killing dogs and eating dog meat
because of the shortage of meat in the country. He went on to say that
some dog owners where surrendering their dogs to the SPCA citing the
shortage of dog food as the reason to do so while others were doing so because they felt that their dogs' lives were 
at risk from the dog eaters and the SPCA could not cope
with the large number of dogs being surrendered and so was having the
dogs injected with a drug that makes them die peacefully but the drug
was quickly becoming short in supply.

These lies about my country horrified me and spoiled my mood. I shudder
at the professional ethics of the journalist who reported such lies and
felt hurt at the ridicule we Zimbabweans are being subjected to by our very
SADC neighbours whom we thought loved us and would stand by us in truth
through whatever ordeal we go through as a nation. I wondered  if my dream
of the African Union coming up with one big country called Africa which
will be a force to reckon with will ever happen if our very own reporters
report such lies that go against the group dynamics needed for such a union
to be successful.

Besides that the trip was quite exciting. There were four of my friends Chipo,
Clemencia, Agnes, Chipo's sister-in-law and myself and we touched base about
a number of issues and had quite some laughs of glee such that the locals in the
country that we visited were surprised by our jovial mood which they didn't
expect from people who are coming from a nation which has been making
horrifying headlines in their country.