By Ngor Khot Garang
In my daily hustle and bustle for a daily bread, there comes a time when I feel ashamed of myself. I try this and it brings me down to my knees leaving me asking for forgiveness even when I innocently don’t know what wrong I have done to question my being. I do pity myself and I ask myself questions, I mean lot of questions some of which I don’t even answer. When I’m down, I just want to remain there forever. I simply don’t want to let the world see me struggling and start laughing at me, a butt of all the jokes? No that is what I don’t want to be.
When I want to rest a bit, at least to have some break, life comes chasing me and I run until I’m weak to do so. I just sit down and start crying but life just laughs at me and God just stares at me speechless. What have I done to deserve all these? I asked and nothing seemed to make any sense not even God asking me to wait. Let me tell you, I have waited for quite a long time and I’m still waiting but what exactly is there to wait for if not to be lowered in a small grave?
I’m not quitting and I will never say never until this life is done with me but this time I don’t want to struggle because it has occurred to me that struggling without a sign that it would work out later is just a wastage of time and I was on the verge of concluding that life is meaningless not until a regular follower, or let me say an avid reader of “Finding Hope” who became real life friend called me and told me how Finding Hope has changed his life from the day he started rummaging through the column late this year.
I was flabbergasted, dumfounded if that is the right word and I was in a mixture of joy and confusion. How and what does this mean? Does this person know what I am going through and what my mind is telling me? I asked myself and, in a few seconds, the inner part of me rebelled and the war broke out inside me. “Ngor, you don’t know what you are doing. Just imagine how people are calling you to appreciate you for your kind work of restoring hopes. It seems like you preach hope and you want to lose hope now, what is the meaning of this? This is impractical”. The inner part of me protested.
“Hey you, let him be. He is not preaching hope; it is just false hope that will never come. How can you claim to be preaching hope when nothing is working out in your life, let him I mean Ngor look at his personal life before you support his idea of Finding Hope.” The other part of me joined the battle. My mind was in total doldrums and there was a sense in which I should line behind the voice telling me that what I was doing was worthless and I should first see my personal life before I travel the whole country with my message of hope.
What do I have? I don’t have a roof over my head not even a bed of my own. I am not working and getting a decent meal, to me is and has always been a prayer request. My future too is uncertain. I don’t know what tomorrow holds in store for me, it could be something good or worse than expected and we all know the situation of South Sudan. We are all hoping for the best that is to come but it is unfortunate that not everyone is lucky enough to receive and here with just a pen and nothing else with my message of hope, I am encouraging people some of whom do not even know what hope means to even when I’m, the writer and preacher is hopeless.
What am I doing, how many hopeless people read my writing and how much does a one copy of newspaper cost? 150 ssp or 4,500 ssp a month but for most people for which Finding Hope is written, this money is too much and it is a four-month salary of SSPDF soldier and they cannot waste this money on newspaper meaning that am just a soundless drum. And this realization hit me like a thunderbolt. Am down and didn’t how to get up on my feet. I feel defeated. My hope torn into millions of pieces. For four years now, this is what I have been doing, writing and writing without reservation but the bigger question is what I’m really doing. I feel heartbroken and rejected, it is a time and energy wasted.
But what about the men and women who fought their pride and called me to tell me how these words have graced their lives? What will I tell these people when I simply throw in the towel? What will the other well-off men who usually peruse through my column and call it “trash” think when I hit the give up button? This is going to be an own goal and I’m not prepared to do this. I have to soldier along and there is need to look at the other side of the coin. But how old am I? 20, 22, or 23, I must be between these age brackets, why then do I have to panic when there are people who are in their 80s and they are still looking forward with great expectation in life. There is need to appreciate my life and whatever kind of situation am going through.
And you, my reader. I know you have fears, hopes and great expectations but sometimes just we are humans, there are times when you just want to concede defeat. There are times when things are not working out when you feel like the best thing you could do is to give up or to just die. You simply become a burden to yourself and you wonder why it is you alone. And it is true why is it you always? You wonder and before you fully understand what is going on in your life, something more terrible happen and it could be the loss of someone who was your only hope in the world.
Maybe your husband, wife, father, brother or sister or it could be school fees problem or business stagnation. No progress with all the efforts exerted and the little capital injected and the whole world is just laughing at you. And this time you become weak to the extent that you just remain inside for days crying and contemplating. “This world, I hate this world?” Why did God put me here? And tears just run down through your cheeks. But I tell you this is the same way we feel as humans but there is still hope beyond tears or problems and it is hope that never dies and it will surely come. We have to put aside everything that we face and focus on the thing that we still have ahead because this life and I’m sorry to say this will never forgive and if there are people that it favors, they are people who gets up when they are down and the best thing to do now is to be one of those people.