Of Carers and Choices...

Awesome Friday.

Just went through a tough time of having to prepare for examinations. I do not have issues with writing examinations, but I do not like the whole mental and intellectual and sometimes emotional energy involved in the whole thing. I am approaching the end of my education college and I cannot wait to get exams over with.

I have recently been on the receiving end of the question as to what I want to do after my first degree. People have been so curious that they have turned out to disregard the two years or so between the end of my first degree and my post graduate studies. To be honest, that is not much of a simple question, even for a person like me who likes to give political answers to simple questions. The diversity of the health profession makes the question (which ideally as supposed to be straightforward) a bit tricky. Apart from that comes the issue of motivating factors. There are different things that attract a young person like me to a certain field and more often than not we rush into fields based on how others are faring in them as opposed to how we feel about them.

This has led me into a serious reflection about the choices we make in life and hopefully you could share my reflection.

Malawi is not what you would call a land of opportunities when it comes to careers. With most of our skilled workforce waiting for employment, we have a lot of people languishing unemployed because of saturation in their fields or other things of the sort. The result is that people have ended up preferring some fields over others which are considered marketable. I personally do understand that, but I know that there are a few guys who preach the good news of entrepreneurship to whom this is not a justification for preferring a field. Levels.

I digressed.

I was talking of how people have flocked into the health profession thinking that employment in the government is an automatic thing, only to be found fighting the same government that trained them just to get a job. Talking of how people thing agri-based professions will help them get easy jobs just because everyone eats everyday only to find that things are not that straightforward.

To be honest, there is no solution for the undifferentiated kid who is just coming from Form Four and is desperate to get into the khomo  lopapatiza called a public university. In a nation where going to a public university means that you are a genius, there are a lot who would apply for a program they have never even dreamt to pursue, just to gain a space in the university while some on the other end would apply for physiotherapy just because the name sounds cool (with no idea whatsoever of what it involves). The few who do some digging would apply because of interest and for the rest, it is the sort of thing where we apply for Environmental Health just because they heard that it is a high paying job.

Going into the university, most people realize that they ended up in the wrong program and most lose hope feeling that it is too late to change. The result is that most resign to fate, ending up being condemned to a lifetime of a career they have to put in a lot of energy to like and the end result is an unfulfilled career and low productivity.

Thinking of this makes me wonder what we may do to fix this. We might point a blaming finger on systems which may relieve our anger for a while, but at the end, this is a personal problem for many individuals. With our primary edication crowded with many things, our young ones will not know what the want to be until they write MSCE (nanga si achina JCE tikufuna tichotse paja?) I just hope that those of you who have relatives in the lower ends of the education will at least tell them that they need to be able to live with the choices they make.

As of you, my fellow intellectual who like me is finding it hard to figure out the next step in your career, you got no reason to panic. Look at the diversity in your career and exploit that. Look at the needs and see where they merge with your interests and soon you will have it all figured out.

In our stages, we tend to be enticed by how others are ding in different professions but we need to realize that the world is dynamic. You may never know if someone is getting rich the right way or through what you think uplifts them. Mwina ndi cashgate…

Lastly comes the issue of passion. Ideally I would have mentioned this first but we always say we are in school to be the cure to the poverty at home. In as much as money is the issue, we need not to forget that there is something called following the heart and that work feels better when you love it.

Enough for the night. To summarize it all, there should be more to choices than just money.