VOF Week 4: Letting my Light Shine

My personal vision for my life is to be a confident self-assured woman who can stand up and shake off the shackles of culture and tradition that suppress my realising my full potential as a woman, as an African, and as an advocate for human rights. I want at the same time to uphold that aspect of my culture and tradition that really esteem the African woman, and gives her that rightful place within her society, upholding her rights as a woman and a human being. I envision myself in a position that I can be a role model for my daughters, granddaughter, nieces, and all girls and young women of my community, of Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, and the African continent. I want to give hope to people, share my agonies and joys, and by sharing in an effort to transform my own life and reassert myself, I envision this as a way of transferring that transformation in a positive way to transform other people’s lives.

Being a correspondent will help me achieve this vision as I am in a position where I am interacting with a cross-section of people, from women, girls and youths at grassroots level, including rural communities; and programme implementers and policy-makers. Being a correspondent will help sharpen my skills – visual, listening, and writing – helping represent my true self and hopefully touch other people’s hearts.. It will mean reaching those communities I never imagined I would reach. It will also mean I will be hearing (reading) and learning a lot more about other communities, becoming more keenly aware and celebrating our similarities and diversities, shaking off prejudices. I foresee being a correspondent as also spurring me to make more effort o get to those communities in my country – rural, farming, and township urban – that I am not getting to currently. This is because I believe the voices from every corner should be heard, and I can serve as a voice for the voiceless.

The way World Pulse is designed and works, while developing my skills, has tugged my heart in a way no other network has ever been able to. World Pulse has been unique in that it has spurred me to reveal my emotions, and I believe – from the responses I have received to my first few tentative posts – I have been allowed by the World Pulse community to do so. I see revealing my emotions as a gift to others, reaching out and embracing, sharing and propping each other up, and building a better global community in which we acknowledge and accept differences, and engage in constructive discourse across countries, regions and continents. I see World Pulse as enabling in achieving that communication that links all of us regardless of our diverse economic, social, academic, and whatever else, differences.