Sophie Ngugi - A Child of the universe

  “Motherhood is the greatest thing and the hardest thing”. Ricki Lake It was a beautiful Sunday morning. Sundays mornings are usually beautiful. Serene. It is like the weather knows it is a Sunday and even if it rains, the day has a sunny demeanor. May be because there is less traffic in Nairobi. Less pollution unless you neighbor some Church with blaring noise.   I have never understood why they do this. The megaphones outside the Church preaching to everyone who is not interested in the preaching. Anyway, as usual, I had plans to start the day with Sunday Mass, but his plans…well he had different plans. I ended up spending part of the Sunday Mass time outside the Church when my terrific two son decided there was more interesting stuff outside.   Despite the accommodating section for lactating mothers and young babies in the Church, he was uncooperative. “Enough is enough.”   He said …through tantrums. He wanted to play, not pray. Sometimes, most ...

Dear son, You are now a Terrific Two! A whole two years of existence. You came into my life and changed my world. The first fruit of my womb. Turned it in more ways than I can imagine. It is said life begins at 40, so what a joy to start a new life at 40! From the first minute you came into the world, you silently whispered “we are in this together”. While I could not hold you for some time, I said a prayer “Lord I need to bring up this boy”. I don’t know if I fell in love or grew in love, long before I saw you. Knowing you were forming in a world I could not see, yet the growing bump was evidence that there is a life coming up shortly! The bump did not grow fast enough for me to get…you know those social privileges of not queuing … I am not complaining. We walked, we shopped, we planned, we prayed, we played. Then you came, and life has never been the same again. You were an energetic boy from the word go. You fought the nurses who tried to put some sharp needle in ...

“Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change”. Barbara Mikulski There are times you just bump into something (or someone) and know it was meant to be. I bumped into social work and in particular into gender and development work. There, I found my passion and my mission and my professional career path. Sometimes career path chooses you, but that is a story for another day. Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash One day I will document my experiences in social work, the good, the exciting, the scary, the bad, the ugly, but more so what keeps me at it. I have not imagined my life away from social work. There is something about social work that runs deep and builds me as a human being. Whether engaged in development or humanitarian kind of work, social work can never leave one the same. It challenges one to a higher level of appreciating humanity and retrospection on what life is about. When doing social work you interact with different kinds of people and l...

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy”. Nhat Hanh  She smiled. I looked up and smiled. We both smiled. We both knew that this was not just a coincidence but a meaningful smile.  “You could smile more often” I had told her several months ago. I met this young woman in a guest house while travelling in a field site in Uganda. She works in the guest house and I had noted how she was acting and wondered if she knew life is too short to live with a sad face. She was far from polite but something about her pulled me towards her. I thought of her as young woman struggling with life’s challenges and wondering when the day would end, starting another day and the drudgery continued. One day after telling me in a “do-not-disturb-me” tone that what I needed was not available, I called her aside and started chit chatting with her. I reminded her that she was in the hospitality industry that required that one be hospit...