Epiphanies Of Life

A few years ago, I was at work minding my own business when a colleague of mine once more asked me to proofread an important email that he was sending to management. His comment was something like, I know you will use your higher-grade English. And I did. I went to his desk, for the millionth time that week to assist not realising that another colleague, now friend and business partner, was watching. She called me to her desk and said that she was working on a book and wasn’t satisfied with the work that her editor had done. I was shocked as I had never thought of myself taking on a huge task as helping someone send out their message to the world. I, reluctantly, agreed to take a look at the book. The next day, I sent her the first chapter with a lot of highlights, comments and additional notes in the email. LOL. Instead of being irritated as I imagined she would be, she actually loved my work and recommended another author that I could work with the following month. The compliments on...

I've been waiting for the right time to post about this and today seems like a good day. A few months back, I was asked to feature on a Facebook group, Wife of Purpose which was founded by two wonderful women called Phuti Lebea and Makoma Nothana. Wife of Purpose is aimed at equipping wives to be better homemakers, better wives for their husbands and to ultimately be able to exercise all their roles fully. They fulfil this by hosting seminars, workshops, whereby speakers engage with the wives. They also ask wives, ex-wives and soon to be wives to engage in conversations that will help improve the quality of their marriages, while running the foundation side of the group, where they collect clothes and other items to give to the less fortunate. Every week a topic that pertains to the well-being of marriage and the individual is shared on their WhatsApp group and opened for discussion. There's a lot of support and knowledge that is shared by the women in that group. I was appr...

Today is my son’s 8 th birthday and I just recently started being okay with talking about his birth and my pregnancy with him. It was the most trying time of my life. I lost 15kgs in the first 3 months of my pregnancy and on the day of his birth, my doctor didn’t show up while the doctor on call didn’t even speak a single word to me. I, then, had to undergo an emergency C-section only to realise breathing when he was born. All of that had me traumatised for years and I only found out recently that it’s called postnatal post-traumatic stress disorder (postnatal PTSD) and that it takes quite a while to heal, hence I didn’t decide to have another child until 5 years later. It is a type of anxiety disorder that is also known birth trauma. It is basically caused by any trauma that you experience through birthing but should not be confused with post-natal depression (PND), even though PDN does contribute to the trauma. A lot of people suffer from such disorders after giving birth and unknow...

I posed a question to some of my frequent readers asking them to let me know what they would love to read more about on the blog and one of the questions that were submitted was on excelling in IT as a woman. Being in IT myself and struggling with finding growth, I took the challenge to find willing participants who would help me answer this question in realistic and practical ways and so, I approached one of my bosses. Her name is  Anthenia Phuku and she is an  IT Executive at Liquid Telecom, South Africa. She started her career as an Oracle Database Administrator in 1998 and has since grown her career, making strides of success ever since. Here are some of her views on growing your career in IT, especially when you are a woman. What drew you to IT? What got you interested in pursuing a career in technology? I wanted something that honored my dynamic personality, where change was the order of the day. IT incorporates constant positive change and innovation.  What e...