I am a woman of colour
Dark skinned like paint splashed on a wall filled with emotions
Walk a mile in my shoes and feel the pain I felt
Feel that adrenaline rush to fit it in

Fair bag, black purse, and dark shades with purple Mac lipstick on these cracked lips
Situations are not fixed with material things
We often rely on those to make them unique

Picture perfect… Actually, it is not!
Step on a scale that lies like a man caught cheating
I don’t mean to pry, but you’re just a piece of art in his gallery
Broken as you are, like a tree’s leaves during a cold winter night
Feel that brush on your soft skin

That colour defines you
Directions are complex, as I break the walls of failure through education
Papers splashed with black ink, written chapters of our lives

Walk an hour in my shoes
Perfection is bliss, confidence is somewhere in the mist
I am a woman of colour, dark skinned like coffee on a Monday morning
I know my dreams, while I cat-walk to my located destination

***

Life is a battlefield. Every day we come across different challenges. We face a high rate of unemployment in my community. Many of us got lost trying to find the path to our dreams. We made right and wrong decisions which led us to worse situations and terrible life styles and bad nightmares, which may haunt us for a lifetime. But I chose the path of studying tourism, hoping to get a job as a flight attendant. Honey, it’s hard and it’s even harder being raised by a single mother taking care of 10 people and being a bread winner.

All she wants is for her children to succeed but others just make bad choices along the way. So I took a pledge to volunteer at a nearby school to help children with their homework and to keep myself occupied. But I discovered a whole new world of possibilities and a passion for writing short stories and poems, which I will publish one day. The ability to love and care for young children motivates me to never give up on my dreams.

I describe myself as a book filled with many chapters to fill as I learn to communicate with many young people like me through programmes such as ‘Help a Child Gambol’ by a young entrepreneur, who collects and donates sanitary pads and face towels to under-privileged homes, or church programmes as they donate school shoes to orphans, and also my reading club that encourages the young and old to never stop reading. Because reading opens a lot of imaginary doors – through the fictional stories, biographies and childhood stories that we all grew up being told by our grandmothers and grandfathers.

Life is a battlefield and every day we face challenges. I am young and bold, living in a location with few resources but with passionate people who have so much potential. I believe that the little I do will eventually make my dreams come true.

If the shoe fits… wear it, in my home, my hood.