Sankara shocks mum with choice of course

By Bill Odunga

When our parents say that we could become anything, they meant you could be the President, engineer, lawyer or doctor. However, they never meant that you could become a poet, dancer or photographer. In their minds, they spend immoral monies to send you to schools with yellow school buses, so that you can make it big. What they do not realize is that their idea of making it big is totally different from what ours are.

REGRET

I remember in high school nobody asked us what we really wanted.  Most often than not, campus students who enrol for courses simply because their high school grades qualified them to, quickly realize that they will have to spend the rest of their lives behind a desk; nursing a job that only becomes relevant after four weeks. Work becomes a drag, and regret soon finds a new best friend.

inconsolable

Sankara, a friend of mine, was at pains trying to convince his mother that he was quitting med school to practice photography. After four years of dissecting the entrails of unclaimed corpses in what brags to be the best university south of the Sahara and north of the Great Limpopo, Sankara decided that inhaling formalin was not part of his bucket list.

The single mother was devastated, inconsolable. A family meeting was immediately convened to prevail upon him to reconsider his choice, but Sankara stuck to his guns. He would rather hang a camera around his neck than a stethoscope. Furthermore, he had formalized his leave from the university, and moved in with a friend offered to host him until he finds his bearing. 

SACRIFICE

Many a time, as students we come to a forked path that requires us to make a choice when the utilities of what we love and what parents love cannot coexist. And on most occasions we choose the latter, out of fear. Fear of the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Fear of our folks’ reaction. All that school fees to take us to med school is not just loose change. We at least owe them that much for their sacrifice.

MEAGRE

But what’s the opportunity cost? Campus is the place we choose what we want to be. Our parents or high school teachers probably think that being a poet or dancer is too demeaning. Sankara’s mum thinks of the 50 bob that she pays the local photographer on Christmas and shudders at thinking of such meagre money for her son. Her heart is in the right place- but wait till she sees the shot Sankara took at the peak of Ngong Hills.  She will rue the day she cast him to cavort with dead bodies.