A day in the life of Mamo

Mamo is a timid, shy girl from a small town of Tabanchu in the middle of the Freestate. We are walking through the Botanical gardens because this is her favorite ‘thinking-spot’ on campus. She laughs and shyly says she has had to come here a lot these past few weeks because of the issues in her life.
Mamo is one of six children and coming to Rhodes was just a privilege only available to her. Mamo’s mother is a domestic worker at a neighboring neighborhood, and her father died ten years ago in a nasty car crash. Mamo is currently on Financial Aid and that is how she is funding her studies. I asked her about her first impressions when she arrived at Rhodes and she honestly admitted that these facilities, the people around this place, the privileges available to us at Rhodes is something new to her. When narrating her life to me she had said:
“I grew up in a small home with a large number of people, my father was not at all supportive and my mother being old fashioned and having not completed school she had no intention of changing the condition until he died in a car crash. Since then it has been hard for her to take care of all of us and provide for our needs. Thanks to NSFAS I could come to Rhodes and I’m grateful as I have learnt a lot and grown personally”.
However, this is not all there is to tell about her life at Rhodes during the year of 2008. When Mamo got to Rhodes she had met certain kinds of friends which she describes as “toxic, influential people.” She elaborated and said when she first met the friends she has now, they were seemingly genuine people who had the same aims in life as she did. Slowly and sadly she realized this friendship she was in was more harm than good to her. When she narrates the story of her friends she has tears in her eyes, her voice quivers and her eyes dart around as if to check if no one is hearing her. When she got to the ‘group’ she had to be initiated by going to EQ and drinking herself to a pulp. She admits that she knew that these were not her kind of people but because they were cool and liked by many, she decided to stay. Gradually she started drinking and smoking as a way of life. She describes as being “sucked in the Rhodent life style”. Mamo started dating a guy from Rhodes and things accelerated to a point of climax way too quickly and before she knew it, the innocent girl from Tabanchu was gone and she had lost her virginity. Mamo’s life started to spiral out of control because she fell pregnant and was forced by her friends and her new boyfriend to have an abortion. She then had a terrible time at the hospital because she had complications with her procedure. When Mamo talks about her experience she breaks down and cries and we have to stop the interview.
The next day we conduct the interview in her res room at Helen Joseph. The room is simple and has the bare necessities. She is nervous and she keeps standing up and walking around the room like nothing is wrong. Being herself, she doesn’t let her problems out in the open and she locks a whole lot of baggage inside and pulls off a smile confidently all the time. We continue talking about her life at Rhodes. She sadly tells me her academic progress and sadly says: “I am failing my first year”. When I ask her to elaborate more she says she hasn’t been pulling her weight and failing is a possibility.
Reflecting on Mamo’s story one would think she had a difficult life and her first year is a total write off, but one need to look at the lessons she has learnt, the obstacles she has overcome and realize that Mamo has done a lot of growing up. One would also realize that there is no manual for surviving your first year at Rhodes or any other institution for that matter. She closed off the interview by saying: “ one needs to be true to one’s self before trying to impress others.”