That year, I got registered at a primary school in my village. I was very surprised because everyone there knew about me, from the learners all the way up to the teachers. I was a very smart kid, and the first moment I walked through the gate, I had already scaled almost everyone and realised who fitted in the category of being friends with me.

I spent my first few days at school alone. I was enjoying the activities the teacher had given us, but I always felt like they could have given me something a bit harder than what they were giving us, because there was nothing challenging about them according to my level of thinking at that moment. I became every teacher’s favourite because of that, and everyone knew about me at school. Unfortunately, our school was unprivileged, and we did not have award/appreciation ceremonies.

I always imagined myself academically competing with other learners from various schools. I really wanted to make my family proud, but there was just nothing I could take home except for the term progress report, which was very underrated and I always judged that I could have done better.

I enjoyed being at school more than I enjoyed being at home. I spent almost half of my time at home feeling sad, and I always wondered why I did not have the opportunity to spend time with my parents like every other kid in my village. I stayed at my mother’s home with her sisters and my grandmother, and my grandmother worked as a housekeeper in town. She used to work fulltime during the weekdays, and she only came back at night every day.

I spent my time with my aunties at home. One of them was going through a tough phase in her life. She was a teenager going through different stages in life, but I really took her as a mother figure to me because she was the nicest of them all to me. With everything being said about how I felt about her, I was too young to realise that she had her own life problems and that I was adding to her stress by being her child.

She used to wake up every day at three o’clock in the morning and start a fire to boil water for us to bath and prepare for school. She was in grade 7 at the time, and she had a bright future ahead of her. She also really saw how gifted I was, and she told me that one day I would make it out of that world and become a Doctor.

One day, we sat down together and wrote a short piece about my dreams. I adopted the dream she had for me. I wanted to be a medical doctor, and she wanted to become successful too. Every day from that day, we went out of the gate together, going to school while looking very happy as nephew and aunt.

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I always saw myself as successful businessman, even at that very young age. I liked doing gardening, and in my mind, I thought I was going to make very large orders for big companies, but that was a very big dream for me to pursue alone at that very young age. Some of the people around me realised how much I loved gardening though, and they even give me a nickname, MOJWADI, which is a Sotho name for a gardener.

Sometimes, when it was the end of the month, my parents used to come visit us. Those were some of the happiest moments of my life. I used to design message cards for them and make sure that, when they arrived, they got them with some heartfelt messages inside telling them how much I loved them. They did not spend a lot of time with us, though. After a couple of days, they had to leave, and I really could not control my emotions during those times when they had to leave.

One time, my parents gave me money when they left, but it was an amount not more than R50. The first thing that came to my mind when I had money was starting a small business for myself. I then bought a large packet of snacks and packed them into smaller ones in order to sell them. I always made sure I counted them first to see how much profit I was going to make, but I had no one to encourage me into making my business a success, so instead of saving the money I had made, I spent it for some things other than business.

Only a few people understood the kind of mind-set I had at the time. My granny used to bring me second hand phones from her work. I was the only kid in my village with a cell phone, so my peers started seeing me as the coolest kid in the village, and I enjoyed it because everyone wanted to hang around me. But, every good thing always has its own side effects. I had a good thing going on at the time, but there were older boys from our village who did not like me, not even one bit, so they started making my life difficult by bullying me in different type of ways. Nevertheless, none of those things stopped me from being a good boy.

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Tell us: How would you handle the pressure of living without your parents around?