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Fadzayi Maposah-Correspondent
There are so many gifts that parents and relatives can leave to their children and family. There is a special gift that I received from my parents, MaNcube and WaMambo.
The gift has taken me far and wide. I have been to places that I never dreamed that I would reach.
I have had meals that are beyond my age. I have been able to meet and mingle with people of various cultures and in the process I have come to understand why they behave the way they do.
I am totally indebted to my parents for this precious gift. In turn I have also gifted my children so that they can also enjoy the gift that I received from my parents. The girls love reading and are thankful for such a gift!
Were you by any chance thinking of any other gift? I am sorry if the gift of reading is not what you expected. I wish to apologise even more if you thought it was something that is totally beyond what you can leave to your children and family as legacy.
At any point my girls and I are reading diverse books. I am an autobiography person.
I love autobiographies because they are able to show a side to an individual that otherwise one would never know about. I have since graduated from my childhood days when Enid Blyton series and the teenage detective series Nancy Drew were my cup of coffee.
At some point I was a hopeless romance fanatic and the stories of women meeting their Prince Charming, falling in love and living happily ever after was what I would die for.
As I got older, I remembered my English Literature notes and dissected each book that I read for the plot, irony and satire as I thought to extract the salient themes.
I am still to fully embrace the concept of audio books.
They are good when one is working or walking and they take the place of music.
Call me Old fashioned, but I prefer actually turning the pages of a book and if need be, highlight some sections and have a page marker to show how far I have gone with reading the book.
The smell of paper, it is indeed magic to my nostril.
One benefit of hard copy books is one gets to have a collection of page markers. There was a time when my daughters would literally outdo one another in creating page markers for me!
When one creates a page marker or any other gift for that matter, one would like to see that whatever they have given is being appreciated and used.
I am sure there are many that can relate to how frustrating it is to get a present for someone and never see them using it!
In my case I would just use the many markers that the girls made for me.
At times I would use them at the same time, putting more than one marker in a book.
It is because managing siblings is a lot of work and one wants to avoid having children at each other`s necks because of purported favouritism.
At the beginning of the year, 2022 I made a resolution to make time to read as many books as possible. I know that resolution was not really smart because as many books as possible is not measurable, it is just a relative term!
I just wanted to be certain that at the end of the year, I would just tick it off as done!
Later, I set a target of reading at least a book every fortnight, which would translate to two books per month and at the end of the year I would have read 24 books.
Currently I am on book 27!
I became more encouraged when a `book friend` shared a list of books that one should have read by the time that they die.
By whose standards I am not sure but I have found some books on that list worth reading. Reading other people`s stories is a great source of encouragement.
The book I am reading at the moment is My life in full by Indra Nooyi and although it is not on the 100 books one should read before they die, it is a good book, at least so far as I have not yet finished reading it.
Indra at some point worked for a company that manufactured sanitary ware. In the book she shares at that time when she got employed there, packaged menstrual products were `perceived as unnecessary and expensive. Most women used wadded or folded cloths that were washed, dried and reused.`
The company had to work to ensure that the product they were bringing to India was acceptable to women and the weather conditions in which they lived.
Part of the extensive research was for women to use pads and leave them in the toilet so that Indra could see how it crumbled or leaked. Indra concedes that the request was awkward but women complied because they trusted her.
What really got my attention regarding this part of the book is that Indra said back then if a woman needed sanitary ware, she had to whisper to the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper would take them out as these products were not displayed.
Since I read that part of the book, I have been observing women and girls in shops as they buy sanitary ware. The young women and girls do not hide the sanitary ware among the other groceries in the basket or trolley, it is just put in.
A few older women prefer to pack it behind the bread so that it is shielded!
It is as if the sanitary ware is lonely or is unable to take a comfortable `seat` next to the other groceries.
To think that it has not been used, but already it is being hidden away from people.
Online Reporter