Problems In Our Life Essay Example

"Problems are a test to the mind”. These words were uttered by my brother, Brian as we spent the eleventh night consecutively without power and our daily meal being porridge over the last couple of weeks. We were in dire straits during this time, but life for us was not always this rough. 

My brother and I lived with both our parents and at that time we were very well – off financially, we went to the best schools in the country and had expensive vacations. We were one happy family living lavish lives. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and to our dismay, ours was just around the corner. My father started coming home late, beating our mother, and being a different person, not the father that we once knew. My younger sister was born and we thought that things would go back to normal, Alas! our father distanced himself further from us to the extent that he stopped living with us. A year later we found out that our father had other kids with several other women, and that was when my mother filed for a divorce.

After the divorce my mother lost most of her properties, she went through depression physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. Our father left with most of my mother’s properties, he even took loans and put my mom’s name as the guarantor. The last we saw our father was when my younger sister was two years old, as he went on and started a new family leaving us in a deep end. These series of events saw us go from living our best lives to nobodies, people pointing fingers at us and throwing shade at my family telling us words like “where is it now?”. We could not proceed with school so we had to stay at home.

My mother, now unemployed, divorced, with three kids, my two retired grandmothers, and my deaf-mute aunt could never insist less on the importance of education. This was an even more difficult period for me where we transferred from the better schools, we were at initially to the poorer schools that did not provide an adequate education. The transition from an English medium school to a Swahili medium school, going from lavish to meager lifestyle, from eating out every weekend to hardly getting enough meals to suffice the whole family. Going through all this at a very young age was very hard as we went every night for eighteen months praying and hoping life would go back to normal. I felt as if my dreams were shattered, no future for me and my siblings despite our mother telling us to never lose hope and that a brighter day is coming.

Despite the challenges, it was during this time of my life that I underwent a period of transformation. It made me realize what other people go through, how privileged we were and most of all to never give up. Seeing my mom go through all that, and guiding us all through it made me the Brandon I am today. I wake up every day being the best person I can be, trying to make a person smile, being strong, being a shoulder to cry on, and being a leader

Being the first to go to an international school in my family and about to be the first to go to university abroad, what has been driving me for all these years is the desire to make my mother and grandmothers proud, and be a role model to my younger sister and finally a better person each day as I aim to impact more lives out there.