Bullet In The Wall:

My mother was murdered when I was looking, a bullet was shot in our house and it sank deep into her womb, where my little sister lay silent and peaceful. Whether she sensed her mother’s distress when she saw the murderers or not, is and will remain a mystery for long. I will never meet her till I step into eternal glory and that is okay. But there was another bullet, one that did not make it to the target but hit the wall behind my mother, it put a hole in the wall and the scar stays till now. That bullet is the representation of everything worse than the first bullet because while it found another target, it was with no particular destination. The scar it left in that wall represents many more scars that will never heal in this life, many that have dragged the bearers to the grave and in the process created many more scars.

Today we have many such bullets flying in our societies and the sadness is less in their flying and more in their being shot. We have stood at the point in time when our single most important role was to send resources into the future; we have seen the greatest endeavour to send our children to school so that when the future finally receives them, they will be worth receiving. The process has turned out to be very tedious and costly, but we have not given up on the responsibility at our hands, we have not let any excuse come between now and then. And yes we have done such a great job. But have we understood what our role is before we acted.

Education, we have come to realise is the single most important preparation we have for our children if they are to fit into the future. Therefore we have sought one better school after another and we have taken all the time in the world to make the money to afford the education hoping that the bullet we send to the future will hit all its targets and not simply lay dangerously and damagingly in the wall. So if that is our approach, we need to understand what it is we need to do to make this preparation worth it. Taking a child to school will not always be equated to education, I will liken it to a supplement to education because the school will only draw from a child what the parents have instilled and continue to instil. The home is the first and most profound fountain of education, the parents have got to make a conscious decision to educate and be educators for their children. They are in place where the education happens and should originate from. And while we have spent tones of money to educate our children we have forgotten the true cost of education, love and commitment.

Miss-education has become even more powerful than education itself. While we pay millions to help children learn about Europe and the developed world, we at home practice the primitiveness that the West has since moved away from. The child that learns about respect and responsibility as topics for an exam is the same whose parent gives money to go to a nightclub. It’s as if we are actively opposing ourselves. Our ignorance has robbed us of the opportunity to be useful today. While we have pursued greatness and glory here on earth, we have left no trail of how to truly live for our little ones. We have learnt to solve problems quickly without creating solutions that will last into creating more solutions, while our children have learnt to switch the TV on, they will never learn how to make one and worse still, why to make one.

The future we have prepared our children for is compressed to a few desks, each a floor above the other. They are going to influence those desks and maybe even redesign it, but they will never touch the world. They have learnt to have sex without touching the heart and those are the bullets we have sent to hit the target of tomorrow. We have the right motive and yet we have so wrongly executed the plan to achieve it. Those bullets are without target because when we sent them out, we had none in mind.

Instead of spending millions to create these kinds of bullets for such a big future, we need to miss a few millions and spend time with our children. In fact we need to spend sometime with ourselves if we are going to look at what we hold well. We need to get our eyes off the TV and see what is in our hearts and in the hearts of our little ones. And yes we need to hit the target, we all need to.