Mountains are for climbing

After two decades of being a housewife, Mrs. H has come to the conclusion that there are more important things in this world that keeping the home fires burning. She’s decided there are mountains she needs to climb, big things she wants to do, giants she wants to conquer, challenges she wants face squarely. Now I am being metaphorical here, so please don’t starting thinking the poor woman is planning on risking life and limb scaling to Mount Kilimanjaro or some other intimidating rock face.

Actually, she wants to make her own way in this world, rediscover her identity as a person and step out of the shadow of her husband and my good friend, Guften Haachipola, Esq. B.A. Hons, MBA, Ph.D.. As you can tell, that’s quite a mouthful, which is why we dispense with the formality and call him Goofy for short. Anyway, Mrs. H has made up her mind that she doesn’t want to stay at home, cooking, knitting, making chair backs, watching soap operas and doing whatever it is housewives do to stay sane. She wants to be a motivational speaker. She privately enrolled at the same institute where a certain former First Lady got her Diploma in Public Speaking after three months of intensive study. She has since framed the diploma certificate and put it over the fire place in their living room.

Now that is a crying shame, not because I have a thing against motivational speakers or about diplomas in ugly, gilt frames hanging on people’s walls. If a few over-excited individuals want to stand on a podium and share their excitement with the rest of us for a fee and call what they do motivational speaking, who am I to stop them? Personally, I was hoping Mrs. H would take up golf and eventually step into the shoes left by one Tiger Woods.
Let’s face it, the golfing world is looking for another novelty, you know someone to bring sexy back to the game and I am sure she’d fit the bill just fine. A middle-aged black woman beating everyone in sight at a white man’s game, landing lucrative endorsement contracts and making pots of money and give the international press something to talk about.

Well, in case you don’t know who I am talking about or make sense of what I am driving at, let me break it down for you. I’ve seen women do big things, great things even, but I have never seen a Sister swing a golf iron the way Mrs. H. Which is why she should have turned pro a long time ago.
If there is anyone who can vouch for her dexterity with the golf iron, it is her husband, Goofy himself. And he found out the hard and painful way.

Brother went outside coverage area a few years ago and returned 48 hours later with a story that beats any fairy tale you’ve ever heard. He said he’d gone underground to escape a shadowy terrorist organisation called the Red Serpents (or is it the Black Mambas?) with links to Al-Qaeda. His wife might have been believed him if he didn’t have a faint and lingering scent of Avon Nightsong in his clothes and what looked like smudges of mauve lipstick on his shirt.

But you see, the Mrs. H. that I know is a woman of few words. So she grabbed one of her husband’s golf club and scored a birdie with his head. To bring his head back to what it was before and to repair the damage to his face, Brother had to be flown to South Africa for emergency cosmetic surgery.
Goofy came back better but no wiser because he kept going AWOL once every blue moon. And every time he returned with one of his ridiculous stories, his wife would play nine holes with his head. That how Mrs. H improved her handicap.

And after all that training, now she wants to swap the golf iron for a microphone and a podium and become a motivational speaker? God forbid! That would be like digging a hole in the ground and burying her talent, like that geezer in the Old Testament did, incurring the wrath of his master and earning himself some heavy-duty punishment I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone.

While we’re on the subject of speakers and people with the gift of the gab, let me take this opportunity to inform you about a conference that will be soon be taking place in the capital. The organisers are calling it a summit to discuss how to make the world poverty free, disease free and sin free. But hey, I may have gone to a village school where the headmaster was a regular troglodyte, but even I know that a summit is just a fancy name for a conference.

I love conferences, but only when I am not attending them. Bloody things put me to sleep, which is why they pay folks an allowance just to show up. Conference rooms would be empty if we had nothing to look forward to. But for me, that’s not the worst part. It’s the snoring among a bunch of total strangers that worries me. That, and the possibility that some paparazzo will pop up at the precise moment when your mouth is wide open and saliva is drooling all over your chin and take your picture and splash it all over Page One!

International conferences are great when you’re the host country. All of a sudden, street lights that haven’t worked since the Great Flood are up and running. Road signs get painted up and all the pot holes on the roads leading to the venue get dabbed over with a few slaps of Nugget shoe polish to make look like black, shiny tarmac. But most importantly, the lawns outside the conference centre begins to look like an oasis in the desert, complete with date palms. Only thing missing are the camels.

And talking about camels...Last time Zambia hosted the SADC conference, some big wigs in government whispered among themselves that perhaps The Great Leader, Muammar Gaddafi could be persuaded to bring a few camels down to roam around the grounds and add some colour to the proceedings, if only to show the world that indeed The Zed is an oasis of peace in a desert of unrest. Someone should have told them guys that hey, this is SADC and that sorry, no Arabs allowed.

Thankfully, it’s not only those who walk in the corridors of power with plenty of unfinished business with the Ministry of Education. Not too long ago, one of the Brothers we fellowship with at the neighbourhood fleshpot and den of sin asked me what on earth the abbreviation BMH stood for. Apparently, his son came from school one day with some History homework. Teacher wanted them to find out about AD, BC and BMH because according to him, these were important abbreviations for anyone studying History. Daddy knew about AD standing for Anno Domini, or after the birth of Christ, BC for Before Christ or the Christian era, but poor fellow had no idea what the hell BMH was.

But as is the tradition of daddies everywhere, he couldn’t let his son know that daddy didn’t know. He looked it up in the dictionary and, failing to find it, he called on yours truly as a last resort. And when he called, the juices of genius were flowing in my veins so I was able to help the Brother out.

“Oh, but that’s easy. BMH stands for Before Manda Hill. It is an important period in Zambia’s history. More like an epoch actually. You could say it is a modern-day parallel of the Dark Ages, a period when we used shop from stuffy little Indian shops in Kamwala with no ventilation and tuntembas—when nothing that was ever sold came with a guarantee. I am talking about a time when the word ‘mall’ didn’t exist in anyone’s vocabulary. You’ll agree with me that we’ve made great strides since then. Today, the signs of Progress are there for all to see. Today, we live in the Year 2010 AA. Now that stands for After Arcades.

”Which brings me to yet another abbreviation LGB I don’t particularly like. This is because it refers to that kind of pest that is the bane of African everywhere. The kind that is resistant to pesticides. The LGB or the Larger Grain Borer has eaten many a good citizen into liquidation and utter ruin. However since the Year AA, LGB has come to stand for Let’s Go Bowling which, I am given to believe, is a whole new way of life. If you haven’t sent them nine pins scuttling in a game of bowls, then you haven’t really lived life to the max. In short, my dear Brother, AA has come to stand for Progress and we should be thankful to all those who have made this possible...”




Source : www.zambiapost.com