Working in the Office Isn’t the Only Way to Make it Big in Life
5 min readBy Apioth Mayom Apioth, USA
September 1, 2015 (SSB) —- In our contemporary South Sudanese society, office work is always associated with progress. As a result, people tend to look down on jobs that require manual labor, and many more professions that are seen, having nothing to do with sitting behind an office desk, such as doing entrepreneurial enterprise. In Juba, for instant, an Ethiopian water tanker’s owner, whose business charges 15 SS Pounds per home, could walk away with 3,000 SS Pounds by the end of the day after having visited 200 homes.
Meanwhile, a South Sudanese accountant, who obviously sits behind a desk from Monday through Friday, filing business transactions, makes about 900 SS Pounds a month. Furthermore, a whole lot of Bangladeshis are doing road construction, obviously brought over by the NGOs; whereas some of our very own people are going hungry, refusing to make something happen for themselves.
There had been no country in the history of our planet earth, where everyone did office work, and they had actually achieved economic prosperity. In the very office, where we supposedly to do work, running water and the light need to be turn on; and sources of these power outages are operated by a variety of workers ranging from technicians to engineers to environmental scientists: they are also mandated to travel from place to place, surveying their assigned areas, looking for obstacles that may get in the way of their work.
These high-salaried workers do their work, even when Mother Nature is nasty outside, pouring hailstorms and what have you. If we are to achieve a substantial economic progress, we rather ought to do what is within our reach and avoid daydreaming about possibilities that are beyond our reach.
South Sudanese as a people have been handicapped by poverty, just like everyone else in sub-Saharan Africa for centuries now since the age of modernity reached our shores; before the dawn of modernity, life was way simpler; some of us were farmers or cattle keepers, and through that, we were able to carve out happy, merry-go-round lifestyles. Life, nowadays, is so expensive that some of us can barely afford to buy a soda bottle.
So, from the moment we become able-bodied to do some work, we get so busy with all sorts of preoccupations to make ends meet that at times, we get few opportunities to go to school, or get our hands on some sorts of skills-enhancing vocational trainings. And by the time, we reached age 36, we have almost lived half our lives, and some of us are still working as porters at hotels and lodges.
The reason why we don’t work in professions that we so wish to pursue is because economic wealth is not spread out in our nation. Culinary art, for example, was exclusively looked upon as a profession of women in the Western World in the centuries past. Nowadays, if you visit a restaurant in the USA, or Norway, there are as many men as women working as chefs. In some restaurants though, men make up about 98% of the culinary art workforce.
Cultures, along with progressive economies, were the machinations of change behind the shake-up in the culinary art sector. Culture is a set of held habitual practices and opinions that a society endorses from time to time. Culture, unlike politics, which may alter it course to a different event at any given moment, is hard to transform into different circumstantial events.
Cultural progress seems to follow economic prosperity; once great economic possibilities are achieved, then culture gives way, and become something of a different matter.
South Sudanese, in general, are culturally sensitive to doing menial manual jobs. And that is fine by me; except that we have a crippling nascent poor economy, where resources are stretched thin, and there are scarcity of opportunities to find what we so wish for. If we had a bubbling economy like Australia, every economic sector would be filthy rich, and everyone would get a swipe at whatever position that he/she desires in life.
And since we have scarcity of resources here and there, the best way get over our handicap is to make the best out of the few opportunities we may have; that way, we can at least accomplish something for ourselves.
Personally, I don’t think there is something wrong with doing menial manual labor. The biggest setback in working as a general laborer is because there isn’t enough money in it. If porters at Juba Grand Hotel were paid in million pounds every year; many people would not be able to find any vacancies all-year-round.
Besides, doing general labor is practically a good motivational exercise by itself. You constantly move around stretching yourself from corner to another end. You constantly move that way until dusk when the day calls it quit on us, and by the time you reach home, you don’t find it necessary to go to a fitness center, because you have already been through that.
Some people wouldn’t like the idea of sitting down in one place all day long, punching words and numbers into the computer, had our culture been tolerable to change of minds and ideologies. In reality, some of us would be totally uncomfortable with not moving our feet every once in a while. Our culture has trained us in a certain way to find certain things culturally unacceptable.
Whatever cultural practices and opinions we may hold in the long run, no one can take away our dignity and gifts of intelligent, which were endowed to us by our creator, God almighty. Whether your friends work at the World Bank, or you have a buddy who is a South Sudanese ambassador to Norway; they reached those stages after being given chances to reach their fullest potentials.
And to some of us, who are doing housekeeping and janitorial cleaning at lodges, we ended up that way, because we didn’t get the resources to go ahead in life. Some of us may hold flashy jobs; however, we are all equal in intelligent.
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I am happy to read a very wonderful article which had never been post by anyone else. We have read it yes but because we have been driven by the traditional habits, we will never change our behaviors. If I compare begging with labor, begging is worse than manual work. It is mentioned in the bible that begging reduces human dignity. Thanks for your article but we will not catch up with current civilization if we cannot distance ourselves away from daydream work.
This article is interesting and educative to the people of South Sudan but it will take time for the people of the South to change from the habit of receiving and giving nothing in return the habit inherited from displaced camps and refuge life, Most people currently living in urban areas in the South have either been in displaced camps or refugees where they were living on charity handout. During the movement people were not settled because of conflicts within the movement. There were rebellion within the movement that cause fighting among themselves, insecurity and instabilities. It gave people no time to learn independent living lifestyle. This habit of dependency is still embedded in the mind of Southerners that is why foreigners are busy enriching themselves from resource from the South.
More than that the government has no plan for creating jobs for the people besides government jobs and because the country is not stability people cannot think and learn from the foreigners who could educate them in the areas of learning new ways. People live under fear and as such the only employment sectors in the country is the government. NGOs and UN. In addition, because of lack of education it is hard for many people to start self-employment in the South.There wilt be changes in the south if hydro-electric power is built for creating industries that will employ young people and if many vocation institutions are established allover and above all permanent peace is established and tribal attitude is changed.
Herman Awola