MY PASSPORT IS GREEN

Much of the last 14 years of my life have been lived in varying socio-cultural settings away from my ancestral backgrounds. I had my higher education surrounded by a different tribal group within the country of my birth. Presently I dwell as an immigrant worker in an African country while I possess a temporal resident permit in another. Hence I have come to appreciate heterogeneity in the human race. As a foreigner, I don’t crave for the benefit of certain privileges of my host community because I know I am not entitled to them. I have also had to endure insults in different forms (understood or not) and occasionally put up with some level of humiliation that being foreigner necessarily subjects people to. I have accepted my lot as a foreigner and I don’t grumble. I try to live my life in peace and seek the common good in every location I have found myself.

I am a Nigerian. Unfortunately there is just so much distrust when people relate to my country men. From the hassles of getting a visa/foreign airport reception to making a “legal living”, one is treated with the highest grade of suspicion and sometimes subjected to such ridicule that violates the universal principles of fairness. I really don’t blame people from all these other countries when Nigerians are treated to such shame in foreign lands since common knowledge attests to the many imperfect conduct of my fellow citizens; almost to my shame! And because we are considered guilty until proven otherwise, corrupt officers of foreign governments have taken advantage of our dreadful reputation. Here is my most recent experience:

I had to cross international borders a few days ago, specifically one that I have crossed already this year. I was travelling back to my job from sitting for a professional exam in another country. On collecting my green passport, the immigration officer took a look and asked me to wait. He then called me in, made a gesture to the pages of the passport and said that the official stamp on my temporal resident permit was “not straight” (the line of the date it bore didn’t form a perfect straight line on a horizontal plane) hence “it must be fake”. I was alarmed. He offered to help me if I’d give him some money. Well, too bad for him. The sophistication of this age means that I don’t carry cash around. I knew that if he were to literally turn me inside out, there was very little money on me. My passport had been checked more than once across the same border, so I was sure there was nothing counterfeit on my passport. When he could not extract anything from me, he said to wait further. I hung on there for about an hour, taking sips upon sips from my water bottle until he shamefully acted up. He made a copy of my (now famous) green passport saying he would fax it to the immigration headquarters for verification and possible correction, and then stamped me out. Not even a coin had as much as accidently fallen off from me to him. However, I came out only to find out that the vehicle I was travelling in had long gone, along with it my luggage. It was at this point I started getting irritated with the whole treatment I had been subjected to. As I was in familiar territory, I was able to find alternative means to get to my destination and gladly recovered my luggage.

What a world! We live to interact with other people, tribe and nations. Man has always been on the move. Whether it’s towards a better life or for the sake of adventure, people will always seek for something away from their home. But every stranger or visitor deserves to be given a fair chance. For anything, who knows who would be the host next time? I have once been badly treated by a government official who few weeks later became my patient.

As for my green passport, I am still not sure I’m happy travelling with it. People should be wise in relating with others from the generalised perspective of their people group. We are firstly individuals, then a part of our communities.

An Undeniable Scourge

It’s October and another breast cancer awareness month. As one involved in health care delivery, I am impressed to write a few lines on the scourge that breast cancer is.

I grew up being fed with the info that cancers were generally an affliction of the non-negro race. They were incurable and passed a death sentence on whoever suffers from them. Today, cancers are found just about anywhere and with increasing numbers possibly due to greater awareness.

The statistics for breast cancer are there for everyone to see: obviously commoner in females than men, the severity is more when the latter are affected. All women are at risk. It is the number 1 cause of cancer-related deaths in women, about 465,000 annually. One in eight women or 12.6% of all women will get breast cancer in their lifetime. Every 13 minutes a woman dies of breast cancer. For this year alone, the WHO projects that over 1 million cases of breast cancers will be diagnosed. These are not mere statistics for researchers but underscore the fact that Breast cancer has become a scourge of humanity.

The good thing is that early detection and invariably effective treatment of breast cancer reduce overall related deaths, allowing women to continue leading happy and productive lives. In fact, it is said that the five-year survival rate is close to 100% when the cancer is confined only to the breast tissue prior to commencement of treatment. As a woman ages, her risk of breast cancer also increases. About 77% of women with breast cancer are over age 50 at the time of diagnosis whereas women between the ages of 20 and 29 account for only 0.3% of breast cancer cases.

And so this year’s breast cancer awareness month calls for emphasis in educating and empowering young women to take charge of their own breast health by teaching them the benefits of early detection.It is recommended that beginning at the age of 20, every woman should practice monthly breast self-exams as well as commence a routine program of scheduling physician performed clinical breast exams at least every three years. By age 40, all women should have annual screening mammograms, receive clinical breast exams by a Physician each year, and practice breast self-exams every months.

But just how many 1st degree relatives of those who have suffered breast cancer have taken a mammogram where it is available? Better still; make a routine of a self-breast exam? The bitter truth is many people are afraid to get a “death sentence” at the prime of their lives and hang on to the false assumption that “what you don’t know can do you no harm”. This is very sad.

We must de-program such deceits from our thoughts, consciously seek to be enlightened, and bear the responsibility for our own health. Indeed, what we don’t know can kill us. Early detection of breast cancer is a good gain. Let us make this month count by raising public awareness on the benefits of early detection.

(Wear and give out a pink ribbon).

THE GREEN REVOLUTION

My own “green habits” really came to my notice when not too long ago a then-acquaintance of mine made a complement on the colour I wore. She said she never likes green on men but could not but make her unusual comment because apparently I "picked a soft and supple shade of green that complements my skin”. In an attempt to hide my blushes, I declared that everyone and everything had turned green. To this, she gave me a smirk and I went on to tell her that I once lived in an area in Johannesburg called Greenstone Hill and the billboard of my neighbourhood mall read “Green is the new black” (black along with white being the universal colours of fashion).

Before the alarm of the present global credit crunch, Planet Green looked the next big thing. Lots of awareness was (and is still) being created on the need to reduce the world’s greenhouse gases. The media world seemed to be conducting a green campaign. Awards were dished out here and there for every significant endeavour towards combating global warming. Indeed tree-planting, hybrid cars, re-cycled paperbacks, etc all make a lot of scientific prudence.

However, I sometimes wonder if mother earth would really go down an extreme cataclysmic path as my green advocates have consistently forewarned. Prior to all of the awards, a lot of reviews had concluded that the scenes of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth were well, exaggerated. This is not about blind optimism. Most of the earth’s soil remains covered with green vegetation. Sometime earlier this year, the UK was clouded in a snowfall that was popularly acclaimed to be the thickest in decades. Floods, desert encroachment, and the like are what they are- natural hazards; hazardous but natural. Also, I have come to observe that nature has her own sequence-the Big Bang or not. Man breathes out carbon dioxide to the lawn outside of his house, in turn the same lawn let out oxygen for his lungs; he feeds on plant products and eventually when he dies, becomes fertilizer for plant growth. The earth is indeed a functional ecosystem which over the years keeps resetting her balance. By this I do not suggest that mankind has got only a passive role in sustaining the planet as it is now. If anything, man is indebted to make efforts towards the betterment of his original natural habitat.

I chose the title of this post while deciding on the layout settings for my blog. As I mused, it occurred to me that there was a green thing, like a revolution going on everywhere. For even the colour of my e-mail silhouette has been green for about a year now .It’s amazing how one can get caught up in a movement without giving it much meditation. This Green Revolution as I see it is beyond creating factual awareness on the greenhouse effect. It’s about everything active, passive or implied that contributes to combating global warming. Whether or not the reduction of carbon gas emissions can be achieved to the extent of reversing nature’s current course should not be a foremost issue. As it is now, we already have that inherent responsibility to keep the cycle of nature going. Yes, after all every individual is a functional unit of our ecosystem.

Blue is cool but green has set a revolution on course.

*Comments are highly welcomed.

Key Phrases: Greenhouse Gases, Global Warming, Hybrid Cars, Carbon gas emissions