There are people whose talents/gifts are recognized when they are as young as three years old. For example artistic gifts like singing and drawing. When these gifts are realized and grown, they blossom and these people become pretty much successful in their careers as adults. Unfortunately, this only happens to a few. Most people struggle to know what their vocation is. In a culture where your supposed to go through school, get a job and finally become successful, most people end up not realizing their gifts and only focus on the educational view point; go to school then college and get an office job somewhere. After some time one feels that they don’t like that job because it only gives them money but no inward satisfaction at all.
Most people, when they finish high school, the government either choose them courses to do or their parents tell them which course to take or they just pick anything for the sake of going through college because the culture expects them to. I have a friend who wanted to become a doctor, but when the government letter came, she was called to do a course which deals with agriculture and business. She had to say no to it and she enrolled in a college to do nursing because she couldn’t pay for a university medicine course hence opted for something nearer to that. She might not have been able to do medicine as she wanted but she will ultimately attend to patients in one way or the other as she has always desired.
For me I was in the category of people who didn’t even know what to do after high school. I remember in primary school I wanted to become a surgeon like many kids that age. In high school I wanted to become a lawyer after I saw the Ocampo seven ICC case. I was inspired by Fatou Bensouda who was the prosecutor and I desired to be like her. Finally after high school I found my self doing IT in a certain university. I didn’t like programming because it require lots of thinking. Networking was another headache. Generally I did not enjoy doing IT.
When I was doing IT I realized that I wouldn’t like to work as an IT person. So I started to explore what I really wanted to do long term. For me it was more of praying and soul searching and eliminating dislikes to finally find what I like. After a whole year of that, I finally realized what I wanted to do. Weird enough there was always a little voice telling me to do this but there were also so many voices telling me how journalism is flooded and I couldn’t get any employment.
There was always that little voice telling me to do journalism and become a news anchor but the negative voices were too loud. All these only came to light after I was frustrated in college doing IT .I used a lot of money doing something that I didn’t like. So telling my parents that I was to quit IT for Journalism, it seemed like some sort of a joke. But long story short, they finally agreed to pay for my university fees and I started do journalism at the university of Nairobi. I have spent two good years doing IT and I need four more years to do journalism. It may have consumed most of my early and mid twenties but I am more happy that I finally figured out what I wanted to do in the long run and that is exactly what I am doing now.
By
Simaloi Toimasi
