Ten years ago, on this very day and date I left Australia under very disgraceful circumstances. I had been studying Finance with electives from Actuarial/Insurance Mathematics. Being a straight A student right from Primary - Lewis Memorial School, Molepolole :A, Itireleng CJSS, Lobatse:Merit, Maru-A-Pula School : Distinction, there were very high expectations from my family, friends and of course fellow colleagues.
What can I say about Australia? A lot, really. The diverse culture there as well as the unique geographic features make it the ideal destination for tourists, prospective international students and relocation enthusiasts. I was based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. I studied at Australian National University, a leading institution not only in Australia,but South East Asia as well. The city is the capital and not Sydney as most people are inclined to believe. I arrived there late February 2002, with a bunch of other international students, nervous, excited and grossly disorientated. The notion of being 9 time zones away and essentially 10,000kms from home was not a prospect most will be excited about.
Anyways, school started and me being me wanted to jump right into it. I had a reputation to uphold.. I had parents who were proud of me and this course which I wanted to show who was boss. At that time computers did not feature a lot in my life. I was just hellbent on getting my degree and going back home.
As fate would have it things did not go as planned. The seduction of freedom, staying away from parents, being able to do whatever I wised to do, eventually took its hold. The partying started, missing school and with little or no focus on education. This is the time when I met the Asian group of friends who invoked the inner computer geek. My parents assisted me in buying an AOpen notebook. It was running WIndows XP PRO, 512MB, 80GB HDD, 1,7Ghz Pentium Celeron, 11". I immediately immersed myself in it, learning everything from spreadsheet to coding (Python was responsible for my first suspension - email bombing of student mails) . I eventually learnt about open source and tinkered with my first Linux distribution - Fedora Core.
I got romantically involved with a certain lady and the relationship was quite toxic. I encountered a lot and endured the abuse, the near-death experiences, the not-so-glorified mishaps. At that particular moment in my life, I lost a lot of friends, especially fellow colleagues from Botswana. Eventually the relationship ended and I summoned my willpower and moved on. I resolved to quit all the vices, and only managed with going gold turkey in quitting smoking. I really struggled with alcohol intake and the next few months I got a part time job at an upmarket restaurant - Milk and Honey as a cook assistant. This was in 2005. My performance at school had improved a little and I as spending less time tinkering with computers.
Christmas 2005 saw us trekking to the farms to do holiday work. This involved anything from vegetable to fruit harvesting. We went to Griffith, NSW (the onion picking experience was something else) , Tumbarumba (blueberry picking on the rolling hills and valleys while listening to hip-hop & R-n-B) etc..It is a great time because we got to mingle with other nationalities and also more partying. However, do not get it wrong; partying does not mean one is not focused or committed at school, there were some who were really focused and passed with flying colors. Others, like me had misaligned priorities and lost appetite for school.
February came and the curtain fell. A letter from Immigration stated that I have violated my student visa requirements and as such i was eligible for deportation! deportation! That word still haunts me even up to now...
...Fast forward ten years later I look back and the journey has been a marvel. Here are the list of my achievements:
- getting married to my Best Half Mrs Boitshepo David, after 7 wowingly edifying years (28 March 2015)
-Vice President AIESEC in Botswana May 2010 - April 2011.
- starting an IT consultancy on part time basis
- starting a blog - the one you are reading now
- quit drinking in Dec 21, 2011.
- completed and graduated with a Finance degree (2011), diploma in Information Technology(2012), Microsoft Business Intelligence certification (ongoing), Project Management Basics (2014), Google
Analytics for e-commerce & mobile analytics (2014), Masters in Finance (completing in July 2016)
- started with FNB Botswana as a credit analyst (2012), turned down Sales Consultant offer (jobless for 3 months and got offered a job at Choppies as an Accountant(Feb 2013 - a job I only did for a week because FNB called me for business analyst on temp), hired as Business Intelligence analyst on permanent basis in July 2013). I am now with Orange, Botswana for now.
So you see this journey called LIFE is really filled with interesting pit stops, curves, chicanes, troughs and crests. What matters most is how you navigate it. So please go out there and maximize your potential. No matter how strong the obstacles are...hold on and persevere...
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