Teach them how to fish 

A young man and his mother, who are distantly related to me, still talk about me with such disdain whenever they get a chance, according to the circles they frequent.

My crime? ‘Refusing’ to pay the young man’s tuition at Makerere University, considering that his cousin, whom I had been looking after since her P4, had completed university and now I ‘had that free cash to spare’.

When he approached me for help, I told him I was not in position to, and you should have seen the look of incredulity he gave me!

Black tax is real, and the need to keep our relatives, ancestors and their ancestors happy, is steadily holding us back. These are people who feel, you should not ‘waste money on yourself’ when your relatives in the village need the cash.

I once had to talk a friend into starting his own family, when he told me the reason he was well into his forties and childless, was because he had too many children to look after, already. We talked for close to an hour, before he saw the logic and realized that his nieces and nephews, as well as the long line of relatives he looked after were not his biological children.

Chances were, I told him, none of them would even remember what he had done for them once they were done needing him. I was pleasantly surprised when he married the following year and started a family.

Don’t get me wrong; it is very Christian to help, and indeed charity begins at home, but be guided in everything you give and do for others.

Don’t run yourself into an early grave, stretching yourself too thin in the name of giving. Don’t deprive yourself and your immediate family of the goodness of God, because you are playing saviour to everybody else.

It is a touchy subject, I know, but ask God how to go about the ‘helps ministry’ in you, before you find yourself robbing a bank and becoming a certified thief, in order to have enough to provide for everybody in your clan.

Help where you can, and where you are not able to, just say it; people will be okay, because you, my friend, are not God. I have realized that some people now look up to their relatives for redemption, instead of God; you can easily become an idol in your family, and you know what God says about idolatry!

So, teach people how to fish and hand out less fish.

malita@observer.ug