“Steemit Engagement Challenge, S9w4: "What is your niche?"

Greetings from the motherland-Cameroon, and happy Mother’s Day to all the amazing moms in this community. Welcome to my blog as I partake of the season 9 week 4 engagement challenge. It has been an amazing experience participating in this season’s engagement challenges.

This week, we are required to talk about what we are good at doing in our lives. Everyone has that unique gift that God has blessed them with. I am fortunate to be one of those blessed with the gift of cooking and caring about vulnerable groups in society.

To get an in-depth analysis of what I am good at, I will follow the guiding questions below to share my thoughts.

What are you good at? Or, what are you interested in?

As I earlier mentioned, I am good at cooking and caring for vulnerable groups in society. With regards to cooking, from childhood, I use to admire the way my mom cooks for the family.

I grew up knowing that it is best to prepare your meals by yourself to be sure of what you eat. I never for once saw my mom or dad buying food in a restaurant. Even though they were traders but my mom will always prepare her meals and took them along to the market.

As an adult today, I prefer cooking my meals and more to that my husband does not also like eating outside of our home. I prepare almost all our traditional meals. We love eating our traditional meals.

Another thing I am good at is protecting vulnerable groups in society. I grew up as a vulnerable child due to the environment and cultural background. Strong traditional stereotypes made life so hard for me and my female siblings. To the extent that I learn to fight back and conquered.

I have acquired skills at the university that enabled me as a human rights defender and gender-based violence case manager to protect vulnerable women and girls. I am so passionate about anything that concerns the rights of women and girls and other vulnerable groups (persons with disabilities).

Why would you say that you are good at it?

I am a good cook because, from childhood, I started learning from my mom. At one point, I took over cooking in our house and each day was an opportunity for me to perfect my skills in cooking.

I can confidently say there is no single day in my life today without me going to the kitchen to prepare something either for myself or for the family.

As I earlier said, I grew up as a vulnerable kid in a royal family where traditional stereotypes placed a barrier to progress in females. We constantly faced abuses which made me more determined to change the narratives.

I studied so hard to break all the shackles of servitude placed on us. Today I can boast of many female lives I have changed due to my experience as a human rights defender and a certified gender-based violence manager.

If there is something else that you would like to become good at, what would it be?

I would love to become a midwife to cater for pregnant women in my society. I know it is a difficult job but from my experiences in the hospitals around town, some of the midwives lack passion for their job especially those that bribed their way into the profession just to have a secured job.

They do not take their job seriously and this has caused the death of many women during childbirth.

Permit me to share one of my experiences with a midwife at a government hospital. I was pregnant and almost due for delivery. I got sick and when I was admitted to the hospital, the doctor was so nice and caring. But the midwife that night was something else. She came to administer an injection to me and it was supposed to be injected on my arm. She rather asked me to open my buttocks for her to administer the injection. When that was done, I could not seat and the side effects were dangerous. The doctor came the following morning and I complained to him, he had to write a petition against the midwife to be fired.

From there, I would love to become a midwife to save a mother’s life from perishing during childbirth.

Tell us about someone that you admire for being good at something.

I admire my elder sister for being a multitasker. She is good at everything she does. I lack words to describe her.

She is a lab technician, a designer, a seamstress, a baker, a singer, a mother, etc. With all these skills she is the best in all.

Her hands are blessed with lots of skills which she uses almost every day of her life. At times I use to wonder how she goes about everything and does it perfectly.

It is difficult to hear her complaining of time because she always says “… you have all the time to do whatever thing you want to do in life… the choice is yours to make…”.

I have come to the end of my presentation and I am inviting some friends to share their entries if they haven’t done that yet. @paholags, @crismenia, @josepha and @janemorane.