NDUKA B. OJAIDE

The Home is the most important environment in the society. Why this is so is because it houses the most important unit in the society - the family. We learn our first lesson about life in the home. The home provides the platform to learn, understand, and apply the basic lessons of life; launches each individual on the road to discovering ourselves and our role in the stages of life. It is said that the first cut is the deepest. the first lesson is the best lesson . For it is the first lesson that determines our success and failure really. It is the first lesson that determines our interest and non-interest in the issues of life. So the home should be the most productive place in the world. It should receive more attention than any other environment in the society. It is said that we can determine the quality of life of any society by the quality of the family that makes up that society. But what has modern society got to teach us, with all its advancment? A total neglect of the home. T

The journey of life is a difficult one as well as amusing. The difficulty is not in the experiences, but in understanding them and interpreting them. It’s amusement is in the perplexity we are subjected to as we wonder in awe of the beauty it reveals. A man infected by a disease, at the point of death is suddenly revamped through the miracle of modern day medicine. His physique shrunk by infection previously, suddenly becomes robust after a few days of administering the recipe of medicine. Looking at the two side of the divide- the grief in the face of the sick and his loved ones, and the joy and smile and happiness on the same faces, after the recovery of the sick, - is amusing in itself. Life is like a pun. The journey of life is punning. I am not a pundit on life. I doubt if anybody is. But lives lesson are the best education available to mankind. Our journey through life teaches us the obvious as well as the extreme. The journey is necessary and we all have to take it and learn fro

While waiting to pick up a friend at the airport in Portland, Oregon, I had one of those life changing experiences that you hear other people talk about. You know, the kind that sneaks up on you unexpectedly? Well, this one occurred a mere two feet away from me! Straining to locate my friend among the passengers deplaning through the jetway, I noticed a man coming toward me carrying two light bags. He stopped right next to me to greet his family. First, he motioned to his youngest son (maybe six years old) as he laid down his bags. They gave each other a long, and movingly loving hug. As they separated enough to look in each other's face, I heard the father say, "It's so good to see you, son. I missed you so much!" His son smiled somewhat shyly, diverted his eyes, and replied softly, "Me too, Dad!" Then the man stood up, gazed in the eyes of his oldest son (maybe 9 or 10) and while cupping his son's face in his hands he said, "You're already qui

They needed no reason. They came simply becos he was of Jewish descent. The Nazis stormed into his home, arresting him and his entire family. Soon they were herded like cattle, packed into a train, and then sent to a death camp in Krakow. His most disturbing nightmares could never have prepared him for seeing his family shot before his very eyes. How could he live through the horrow of seeing his child's clothing on another becos his son was now dead as the result of a "shower"? Somehow he continued. One day he looked at the nightmare around him and confronted an inescapable truth: if he stayed there even one more day, he would surely die. He made a decision that he must escape and that escape must happen immediately! He knew not how, he simply knew he must. For weeks he'd asked the other prisoners, "How can we escape this horrible place?" The answers he received seemed always to be the same: "Don't be a fool," they said, "there is no e