About

My Story, My Song

‘And what do you hope to study,’ asked our family friend, turning around to me. ‘Journalism.’ was my prompt reply.

To this day, I cannot recall just how I seemed to be so specific and confident in my reply. But I can recall the exact spot where I was sitting, who I was speaking to and the circumstances of that conversation.

We had emigrated to Manchester, England about a month back and were visiting friends who had also come from Kenya and were living nearby. It was March 1968, just after the infamous ‘Exodus of Asians’ from Kenya. We, as youngsters, did not fully understand the circumstances that had brought us here, but most adults were aware of the political changes for the Commonwealth and its Citizens in Britain.

Sitting here with my family, though, and talking to our friend, all of that was a mere dot in the background of my youthful mind. A whole new future full of ambitions and desires and the excitement of an unknown career awaited me. At the heart of it all, I wanted to be a writer.

In the ensuing decades, my personal life veered further and further away from ‘journalism’ per se but never far from the love of writing, which included articles for local newspapers, magazines, and, in the last few years, blog posts. My career in admin work had progressed to a career in teaching which had opened up an amazing ‘world of words’ for me, especially in the discipline of Social Sciences.

Having become a ‘voluntary’ migrant twice over, the topic ‘Movement of People’ has invariably grabbed my attention. I have poured over many articles and books pertaining to this topic and know that my writing will always reflect socio-historical events connected to migration.

My initial blog ‘Voices of Exodus – Mothers of Kids Overseas’ was born to record my personal musings and journals reflecting incidents of either voluntary, or forced migration and to the love and grace of God experienced through it all.

Now in 2020, with the whole world at a standstill because of the COVID19 pandemic, I feel burdened to open the blog up wider to include other voices of exodus from far more ‘constrained’ circumstances than mine have been and to explore how this virus affects ‘movement’ and its related activities for families spread out far and wide. What about refugees and people in detention centres awaiting visas? What are the mental and physical consequences of both their exodus from their homeland and the pandemic?

I’m keen to record socio-historic incidents of our lives for encouragement and for reflecting on – the movement experienced in our lives or in our forefathers’ lives and the love and grace of God that instills strength and forward-looking mindsets in us

If you have the desire to express your ‘voice of exodus’ I’d love to hear from you, wherever you may be right now. Leave a comment below and share so that collectively, in spite of our ‘setbacks’, we can say –

This is my Story, This is my Song.