Features
Work is a blessing; God bless all workers
Everything good that has ever been accomplished in human history happened because of work; usually hard work. Sometimes our most enthusiastic efforts have been focused on finding ways to make work easier. But the work never completely goes away, does it? That’s because work is the engine of life. It gives us reason to get up in the morning and satisfaction when we take our rest in the evening. In many countries, there is a special day to honour the men and women who get things done—we call it Workers Day, May Day or Labour Day.
Most of us spend a good portion of our day working. Whether in an office, classroom, or construction site; the garden, home, factory, or on the farm, work is simply a part of life. Usually we are thankful to have work, though we may be anxious to finish it as quickly as possible. Work allows us to provide the necessities of life for ourselves and our loved ones. But have you ever thought of work as a cure for troubles and heartache?
Gordon B. Hinckley a religious leader once said, “I believe that for most of us the best medicine for loneliness is work and service on behalf of others. The best antidote I know for worry is work. The best medicine for despair is service. The best cure for weariness is the challenge of helping someone who is even more tired.”
Because work, by definition, requires effort and exertion, we tend to see it as something that makes life harder. So how can it possibly help us through hard times? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that work gives purpose and meaning to life; especially when our work makes life better for someone in need. Such work lifts our spirits and puts our problems in perspective. A person may retire from a career, but we need never retire from serving others and seeking to improve the world.
Work is a mental, physical, and spiritual necessity. We need it not only to stay alive but to live well and to grow. When a mother of young children was asked how she made it through difficult times, she explained that mundane tasks like washing and cooking kept her going. Whenever she felt anxious or discouraged about her life, she would find something to do, and somehow, while organising a closet or at the market shopping for groceries, she discovered the strength to carry on.
It’s work that gets the grass mowed and the car washed and the corn and yam in the barn at the end of the season. It’s work that gets contracts filled, laundry folded, disputes settled, diseases cured, and food transported from one end of the country to another. Work designs and builds highways, bridges, homes, and factories.
But even more than that, work builds people. It teaches discipline, focus and sacrifice. Work is more than what we do; it shapes who we are. Far from being something to avoid, work is a blessing and a necessity; we are thankful we can work, and we seek work that will make our lives and our world a better place.
No one did this better than Thomas Edison. At a young age, he began tinkering with things in his basement laboratory, doing what some might call work but what he simply saw as living. He received more than 1,000 patents—the equivalent of one every two weeks throughout his working career. His inventions include the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, batteries, motion pictures, and the first viable system of centrally generating electric light, heat, and power. At his death, people and communities around the world dimmed their lights in honour of his work. Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Work isn’t measured eight to five any longer than it is reserved for what we often call the workplace. Isn’t every place a place of work? There’s housework and homework, teamwork and paid work. We work in the garden and in our churches; we work at getting an education; we work at being kind to one another, at selflessly serving those in need. We work at getting in shape and getting past where we were yesterday. We work at making something of our lives.
More than 1,600 years ago, St. Augustine is said to have taught this timeless truth: “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”
Indeed, our willingness to work can make a big difference in life. A leader who worked for several years in a service organisation with hundreds of young men and women observed that the defining quality of the best young leaders was their ability to work. Those who knew how to work were happier, more confident, and better able to adapt to new situations. They were problem solvers. And most often, those young people went on to have successful lives. From early on, work spelled the difference.
And so we celebrate work. It’s a day set aside to rest from labour, even as we remember all those who labour to build this nation: in the farms and factories, the offices and warehouses, the stores and schools, the roads and highways; anyplace where honourable, honest labour is performed. Those who work fuel the progress of nations and the betterment of our communities. Truly, workers deserve a pat on the back and a heartfelt reminder of their importance in our society.
Work is good for the soul. It builds muscle and character, it strengthens hand and heart, and nothing gets done or moves forward without it. Though work is different today than a 100 years ago, it’s still essential to life and happiness. Good work satisfies the soul and makes the world go round.
And so, on this day when we praise work and workers, may we roll up our sleeves and celebrate the blessing of work.So the next time you feel worried or downhearted, try some work. Your honest efforts to bless others and contribute to the world will bring the wonderful and sometimes unexpected blessings of work.
By Samuel Enos Eghan
Features
Cocaine and human anatomy
The Journey to London is not an easy one when you’re carrying a pot-belly.
And, if the pot-belly is a fake one, then the carrier must face indictment and explain why his protruding belly must not be properly examined to determine the degree of genuine cargo in it.
As it were, some pot-bellies have been carefully cultivated through regular beer quaffing, reinforced by the evil of indulging in khebab chomping. When you drink beer every day for five years, you are bound to lose your soul, and in its place will be a brewery installed in your belly. It is, however, an honour to have a brewery as a body-part.
And when you are going to London, the immigration officer can readily recognise your belly as one that has either a bubra-background, a star-origin or a club-destination. Immigration officers are now trained to prophesy.
The immigration man is generally interested in bellies, not for the sake of it, but because stomachs have become multi-functional these days.
Yes, the immigration officer is often curious why a belly well examined does not bear the tell-tale marks of beer addiction and yet, the belly carrier also doesn’t sound a likely host to refugee worms. So what is in the belly? Five months pregnancy?
SUSPICION
Normally, a suspicious immigration officer must be careful how he handles the belly of travelling men. With some men, their pot-bellies are their only treasure. So they tell you to handle with care!
“Don’t mess up with my belly, men!” a traveller would say. “Do you know how many goddamn years it took me to build this?”
Apart from belly size, immigration capos also use a bit of psychology. When a man comes by unduly agitated and wants to hurry small through, he is a likely candidate for close examination. His huge belly has no guilder antecedents! What he has inside is dangerous cargo- cocaine or heroin carefully packaged and swallowed.
If the plane doesn’t land quickly at Heathrow for the carrier to discharge, then an obituary becomes inevitable. The digestive juices in the belly and ensymes might be strong enough to digest the covering and leak out cocaine. Death is assured!
So the agitated traveller is chaperoned into a little side room and questioned. The officer would like to know whether there is any drug in his alimentary system.
“Nonsense!” the traveller would cry out. “I am a final year doctorate student in Law. To suggest that I’m a cocaine smuggler is an affront to my noble academic pursuits. It is blasphemous to the God I worship. I am going to see my lawyer to deal with you…”
LABOUR
When the man mellows down, he is given something small to drink to cool his heart. Sooner than expected he begins behaving like a woman in labour, He dis-charges pellets of cocaine, 60 or more.
So suddenly, a man studying for his doctorate in Jurisprudence at Oxford suddenly admits that he is a cocaine courier extraordinaire.
Sometime past, drug smuggling was at its real peak and cocaine seized on couriers suddenly turned into sugar when it came back from forensic examination. So you would wonder why any person in his right senses would either be stuffing his rectum with sugar packages or swallowing pellets of sugar.
Many drug barons were released because cocaine suddenly became granulated sugar, heroin became cocoa powder and various drugs miraculously assumed harm-less chemical formulae. Today, I do not think such miracles are still happening.
However, there are miracles as far as drug smuggling is concerned. First, the baby nappy method of the early 1980s is still in operation. A baby is carried with a wet napkin that immigration officers would not suspect contains coke. Sometimes it is not only wet, but the baby’s pooh-pooh also shows.
Now, the new trick is with snails, a delicacy that people need in Britain. They are stuffed with coke and exported. The yam formula has outlived its usefulness. So people have gone back to the late 1970 crude method of stuffing female genitals and taflatse rectums with coke.
This has necessitated the forcible examination of the orifices of the human anatomy in any event of suspicion.
Now if the stuff is not detected at Kotoka International Airport that might not be the end of the story. When the courier gets to Britain and he is or she starts dancing without being asked to, the immigration guys know that there’s “something in the soup.”
Fact is, every item or substance introduced into the human body must evict after some hours. That is why human waste doesn’t stay in there forever. It must exit compulsorily.
After flying for six hours the swallowed cargo in the belly starts to exit and it must be pushed back, a task that is well-nigh impossible under immigration scrutiny. So the courier becomes overly agitated and starts hissing like a snake. Soon he (or she) must start dancing, hoping that it would prevent the capsules from dropping out.
TRUTH
The African belly dancer is politely invited to enter into small room to free himself from further alimentary torment. That is the moment of truth.
There is no easy way to making money. With drugs, you could earn 30-years in jail. Saudi Arabia, you’ll be beheaded. In Singapore, you’ll be in for life just like in Thailand where Ghanaians are languishing today. Beware of drugs!
This article was first published
on Saturday August 6, 2005
Features
The Prophet (part 11)
Priscilla had gone away. She needed to pay an old debt, and the creditor had promised to visit violence on her whole family if she didn’t pay the GH¢700 by 8pm. Another woman was waiting in the other bedroom. He was about to join her when the voices started.
“You are here already?” Antubam said. “You deserted me completely as I went through the ordeal this morning.”
“Your own stubbornness got you into that situation. You must never approach those book people again. Do not get into any argument with them. Enjoy the money, the power and the women we have given you. You can never win.”
“And what about the man, Gidigidi.”
“The stick will give you all the protection you need. He talks a lot, and he likes fighting. But as you told him, he has no brains.”
“I need people to help me. The two girls were reliable, but they are gone. All the others are thieves.”
“They are thieves? And what are you? Remember that in the business you have chosen, there are many risks and dangers. We will try to help you. But you are very greedy’.
“The girl, Betty, told me that I will receive punishment sooner or later for deceiving people and for using the name of God. Is it true? Can you help me avoid this punishment?”
“Don’t worry about any punishment. Leave everything to us. We will give you all the protection you need. And by the way, the fetish priestess has made a request to Nana Kofi Broni to release you to her one day every month to keep her company.”
“That must be a very big joke. I will never, never again sleep with that old drunkard with rotten teeth. Never.’’
“She has already presented drinks at the shrine. If you don’t go, we are under instructions to fly you there by five o’clock and take you back home by six o’clock. If you don’t obey, your manhood will vanish and never return’.
“Have you people come to help me or torment me? Why can’t you find someone else to satisfy the old witch’s desires?”
“Next time you say such a thing again you will receive more lashes than you did last time. Start preparing for Sunday’s service. You are about to become the most popular prophet in Ghana.” The voices seized, and a strange silence seized the atmosphere.
Antubam was perplexed. What, he wondered, had he gotten himself into? He only wanted to grab that beautiful girl, Betty, marry her and have five or six beautiful children with her. But his desire for that girl seemed to have released a chain of confusing events.
Apart from the fiasco at the shrine for which he had to go and perform pacification rites at the shrine, he was compelled to have sex with that stinking old priestess. Her mirrors couldn’t bring up the image of Betty, yet she blackmailed him into having sex with her. And now the dwarfs want him to make that repulsive act a monthly ritual.
How annoying. But could he afford to lose his manhood? What would he do with the regular supply of two women a day? And how could he give birth to children? And what was he going to do with the threat from that fool of a competitor, Gidigidi? The stick provided by the Okomfo saved him on that occasion, but what would happen when he was eating, having a shower, or sleeping?
And now the dwarfs claim he was about to become one of the most popular prophets in Ghana. He was thrilled at the prospect. It meant more money, more power and control over people’s lives, and of course, more women. But at what cost? At the back of his mind, he felt an urge to go to Betty, confess everything to her, and ask her to help him start all over.
It was clear, Antubam thought, that a power far greater than Nana Kofi Broni was behind Betty. From their own mouths, the Okomfo, the stinking priestess and even the dwarfs had all indicated that Betty and her ‘book’ were too much for them.
But did it make sense to go to a girl you badly want to subdue and, having failed to achieve your aim, now go to her for help? How could a proud man like Kofi Antubam go through that? No, the cost of going to Betty was too high. He would continue to enjoy being a false prophet for now. Perhaps, if he got into trouble sometime in the future, he would go to her for help. But as for now, the show must go on.
Betty and Mary started work with Morrison Construction, and established a relationship that continued for many years. Completely satisfied with their honesty and hard work, Mr Morrison entrusted the acquisition and supply of materials in the Eastern Region to them, and concentrated on the other aspects of his work.
He paid for their admission to the University of Technology to undertake a sandwich programme in building construction, which they did online and on some weekends. They forgot about Antubam completely.
Kofi Antubam continued in the church business for many years. He became very popular for his miracles, and for several other things. On a few occasions police were called to the church premises to control his assistants who often exchanged blows over the sharing of money.
Quite a number of husbands confronted him for destroying their marriages, and he became known for raining insults on radio callers who asked him ‘stupid questions’. But he faced his main problem at home.
At first, he was only dealing with dwarfs who only spoke in shrill voices. But over time, all manner of creatures appeared before him, physically and during his sleep. On several occasions he tried to call or go to Betty, but the dwarfs restrained him. He sought solace in whisky and gin, and quietly hoped that Betty, or Mary, or Suzzie, would find a way to save him.
“That must be a very big joke. I will never, never again sleep with that old drunkard with rotten teeth. Never.’’
By Ekow de Heer
