March 11, 2014
In my previous post I mentioned that life is more like that dealer at a poker game that hands out the cards that can make players feel either lucky or unlucky. However, regardless of which side of the luck they find themselves, they would not call the dealer unfair for giving them a bad set of cards. I also said that we should look at life on that context and not call it unfair for giving us a bad hand to play in life. As I said, even when a set of cards given to anyone may seem very poor a person can still come out a winner. Think for example people that are born in remote parts of this world. Parts that are so remote and poor that it would be hard to imagine anyone coming out a winner. However it can still happen.
I once came across the story of Legson Didimu Kayira from Nyasaland, east Africa. He estimated that he was born in May 10, 1942 because, where he was born, they didn’t keep birth records. Not long after being born, his mother abandoned him at the Didimu river and walked away because he was too heavy to be carried. A village woman rescued him and returned him to his mother. His parents were member of the Tumbuka tribe. Approximately 3,000,000 lived in Nyasaland and only 22 had graduated from a university. However, none had graduated from an American college. He later decided that he would be the first one.
In 1946 he began to attend a Church of Scotland missionary school that was three miles from his home. He had to walk every day and the school had no paper, pencils, or books. The students were also expected to bring their teachers food and work on their gardens. The work was hard and he began to have second thoughts about attending school but decided to continue. For his junior primary school he had to walk 8 miles every day to attend the Wenya mission school.
The district superintendent was so impressed with Legson’s enthusiasm and dedication that he arranged for him to enter the old famous Livingstonia Seconcary School in Karonga. There he read about the life of Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery.” He later became inspired by the words of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda at a rally in support of his country’s independence where Dr. Banda said “I saw the land of Lincoln as the place to find freedom.” Legson was so inspired that he decided he would go to America to study.
On October 14, 1958 he started his journey to do just that. He decided he would go to Cairo, Egypt, which was 3,000 miles away from where he lived. He had no means of transportation. He walked through dust storms and thick jungles. Sometimes he followed roads or trails from village to village and other times he would follow the railroad tracks wishing he had money to take the train. He worked odd jobs wherever they would give him one so that he could eat. In January 19, 1960 he reached Kampala, Uganda. He learned the language and found that the United Sates Information Service in Kampala had a free library and began to go there often. One day Legson came across a directory of American Junior Colleges. The first entry that he saw was for Skagit Valley College, a two-year school in Mount Vernon, Washington, 60 miles from Seattle. He wrote to the school’s dean, explained his situation and asked for a scholarship.
Within 2 weeks he received a reply, offering him a full scholarship and help finding a job. On December 16, 1960 he came to the United States and found that he had become a sort of a celebrity. Word had leaked from the embassy about his long journey to the United States and many newspapers told his story. One of the headlines read “Long Trek to Glory or Death Ends.” While in school he wrote papers that were eventually published in 1965 as his autobiography. He named his book “I Will Try” after the motto of the Livingstonia Secondary School that he had attended. His book won the Northwest Nonfiction Prize for autobiography. Legson went on to write and publish five novels and many articles. He once wrote that he came from “one of the poorest families that God ever created since the beginning of time.” In another article he wrote “ I learned I was not, as most Africans believed, the victim of my circumstances but the master of them.
I found his story remarkable because many of us give up without facing as many obstacles. There is no doubt that the odds were stacked against Legson. When he started his journey, Cairo, Egypt was 3,000 miles away from where he lived and, in between, there were hundreds of tribes that spoke more than fifty different languages and he spoke none. He also became ill and had to rely on strangers to treat him and to have a place to stay and convalesce. On many occasions he had second thoughts and considered ending his journey. However, he continued to play the cards that life had given him to the best of his abilities and never dwelled once about the fact that life gives many people in this world better chances at an education and at success. He instead continued to play his hand and came out a winner. This is the reason that we should not spend a lot of our energy thinking about how worse off we are compared to others. We should instead play our hand aware that regardless of how hopeless our situation may seem, we can still win.