At the age of 45 years, sociologist and political activist Viscount K’Owuor has paused to reflect on how his life has panned out.
About two decades ago, K’Owuor was not sure if he would amount to anything in life. K’Owuor had not completed his secondary school education and spent his days doing vibarua jobs in Nyanza for a few coin-payments.
His life, as he narrated, changed completely when he made the bold decision of going back to high school. Here is his story:
When you start off in your 20s, you can never perfectly determine what your 30s hold for you, or what is in store for you in your 40s and how life might turn out in your 50s.
But you can give it a trajectory through conscious decisions, consistent values that shape your habits and persistence in efforts towards your life goals. You must be decided on your ideals and work to pull your reality towards those ideals.
Because things might never work as exactly as you desire, the quality of resilience must be ingrained in you.
I started off as a delivery boy for some shop keeper in Rongo who paid Sh. 30 per day , proceeded to kazi ya mjengo at Sh. 70 per day , to a mtumba seller at Sh. 100-500 per day , to a boda boda rider at Sh. 500-1000 per day, to a Sample Networking Officer at Sh. 38, 000 per month and annual Gratuity of Sh. 60,000.
After going back to school for my KCSE and after acquiring a Driving License I moved to a Constituency Election Monitor at Sh. 45,000 per month, a job that required a Degree, with consultancy works in between earning me some extra income. My Facebook engagements have probably earned me more money than any single occupation I’ve been involved in.
These have come because of accumulated adult knowledge, skills, attitudes, social capital and networks built in 27 years. I will be turning 45 in August this year. It required going back to school. It required mentorship. It required personal discipline.
I became independent – relying on my own devices for survival – at the age of 19 or thereabouts, and I think I was decided then, with less experience and weak support systems of course, what I wanted for myself, and persistently journeyed towards that direction.
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I’m not where I’m supposed to be but I believe I’ll reach there. I don’t regret any single decision I made in the past , because my decisions either worked for me or provided invaluable lessons.
I’m proud to say this; in 27 years there is no single full year that I’ve been out of work. If the world didn’t provide it for me, I provided it for myself. Self Reliance for me is a matter of life and death.
When we are decided to achieve for ourselves certain goals , when we remain conscious of those decisions, when we work to meet the conditions for success, when we start this in good time – your current age as a youth , we are most likely to achieve it.
Single-minded focus is all that is required of us.