Chapter (1-7)
I found Tambudzia's hard work really moving. Even after helping work her families land all day she was able to manage her own crops to help herself go to school. However the manner in which she achieved this money may have been seen as luck and the misfortune of her brother may have also been "luck", yet she was never relying on these factors and was doing everything in her power. However unlike Tambudza, I had never planned to go school but it was my misfortune in my previous career that allowed me the opportunity to gain an education that I would have otherwise missed out on. As many of us have come to realize we take our education for granted. We don't realize how good we have it and we have many people who drop out of secondary education and college for much lesser reasons.
However it's hardly fair for me to criticize anybody as far as that aspect goes. I had a very low GPA in school as well because I believed it was a joke and did not take it seriously. I thought I had my whole life mapped out and realized after my military career that did not go as I had expected that education was vital. Furthermore I feel I must note that I knew for a long time that I had wanted to join the military and did not join because "I did not know what I wanted to do with my life" as one of my class mates so eloquently stated about people joining the Army.
Yet it's horrible when I think about it this way. I did not take education seriously until I had to, when my other options had closed and education was a necessity to be successful. Tambudzai and members of her family had to go above and beyond to gain this opportunity, doing work much more labor intensive every day than most of us do in a month. This goes above their own personal ambitions as well it becomes a necessity for them to ensure the survival and better being of their people and country.
I think it's great how Tsitsi Dangarembga shows almost the mindset behind Nyasha and Tambudzai. Nyasha being born in Europe carries almost our cultures mind set. We are shown she has attitude with the way she always argues back with her Babamakuru who was born in Africa and ignoring the hierarchy. We are also told she even thinks about failing a test just to see how her father would react kind of brings it back to the majority of us and how we don't take it serious. Tambudzai on the other hand in the past had to work very hard to go to lower levels of school and for the most part carried traditional Shona values (although she questions them) and works really hard at school not that Nyasha doesn't but I have kind of gathered that Tambudzai takes it seriously, much more frequently than Nyasha.
Finally, I am struggling on the message to take from this, at first it seems that if you desire anything enough it can be achieved or obtained. However that may only be part of the message, because sometimes desire may not be simply enough. Coupled with their desire to escape poverty is the felt need to work hard and get an education, because it is seen as the only means through which to obtain what they really desire: to escape poverty.
You make a good point about how hard work and luck seem to both be at work in many circumstances. Isn't there some kind of aphorism that says that hard work merely sets the stage for a person to take advantage of good luck. Your observation about what motivates a person to take education seriously is interesting. Tambu saw education as the only way out, whereas Nyasha took it for granted. I think many Americans take education, like literacy and numeracy, for granted. But for now, it is no longer enough to just know how to read and write; our culture requires so much more, and it is hard to do. Also, the rewards are sometimes intangible and a long way off. I guess the sometimes the problem is that just doing okay is still hard work. The promise of ease and wealth is not really the full reward for a good education, I'll tell ya that.
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