The chanllege after Ice Bucket Challenge

There is a chill in the Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC), the rave on social media just a couple of weeks ago. A new challenge is now trending. I had hoped to receive the IBC.

With the temperatures in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun in the triple digits and my own raging internal heating system (prematurely, mind you!), an ice bucket would have found a perfect home on my head, and help fund ALS research, the goal of the IBC.

If you don’t know what ALS is, ask the “Nollywood stars” who participated in the challenge … and received an earful from social media critics for their trouble. They were asked if they had finished raising funds for Ebola, malaria and all the preventable diseases that kill 16 per cent of Nigerian children before age 5 (UNICEF, 2013). Also, from where did they get ice since less than half of the Nigerian population (48 per cent, World Bank data for 2009-2013) have access to electricity and those who do have become used to Never Expecting Power Always? The point? Charity begins at home … literally!

I didn’t receive the IBC, a challenge that I wanted. All of a sudden though, I am now inundated with a challenge that I probably need but don’t want. That is the Gratitude Challenge, the new thing on social media. I should be grateful that I have friends who encourage me to count my blessings. As a Christian, gratitude should be second nature to me.

The challenge though in my participation in this challenge is that 13 years of active, followed by eight years of peripheral, journalism have killed all gratitude bones in my body. It is a profession where bad news is good news and the fare of front page headlines. As if that wasn’t enough, I obtained a PhD in political science from a department awash in post-Marxism, postmodernism and post-structuralism. It was poor scholarship to simply accept the “prevailing orthodoxy” … and I aimed to be a good scholar! The icing on all of this is that by nature, I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of gal. How on earth then can I count the blessings around me without the temptation to “deconstruct”?

Last week, I visited my daughter and her two-month-old baby. The baby was sleeping when I arrived. When she awoke and her gaze settled on my face, she gave me the most beautiful smile ever. My heart melted and I thought I “had died and gone to Heaven.” Her mother brought me down to earth with, “I think she’s still sleeping.” Yep, that’s the daughter I raised … exactly in my own image!

But I am willing to venture out of my comfort zone and take up the challenge on the condition that everyone who’s thrown me the Gratitude Challenge and you (yes, you reading this) will take on my own challenge, the Relationship Challenge. There is a background to it.

Years ago, I met a woman in church. Her name was Melia. Over the years, we became close “church friends” (friends you only see in church). We did a lot of praying together and encouraging each other. She liked my Nigerian clothes and I encouraged her to wear them. She hesitated because she didn’t want people to think she was misappropriating someone else’s culture. I told her, “I wear jeans and t-shirts all the time and you can wear my boubou too.” She didn’t. I didn’t push.

We lost contact after we moved to a different city and another church. We later reconnected on FB and regularly “liked” or commented on each other’s status updates. Then she had cancer. When she recovered somewhat, she returned to Facebook and was quite active once again. We resumed our interactions – mostly by simply “liking” each other’s posts and comments. Unfortunately, while she was in remission, her husband, Lee, got sick and didn’t recover. She was devastated, understandably. The following months were quite a struggle for her emotionally and physically. But she soldiered on.

For several days in July, I kept thinking about Melia and wondered why I hadn’t seen her status updates on Facebook in recent times. The feeling got so strong on July 30 that I went to her page. There was nothing recent. Curiously, I kept scrolling down looking for her last post. What I saw shook the chair beneath me. It was an obituary announcement posted by her daughter-in-law. Melia had passed away in December 2013, a year after Lee’s death. I wept, both in grief and in guilt. What kind of friend was I that it took me eight months to notice my friend’s absence?

The other day, I got a “Friend Request” on FB from someone whose name was unfamiliar though there was a vague déjà vu about her face. Eventually I accepted the request and she promptly posted on my timeline, referring me to my in-box where she had sent this message: “Are u aware dat ur sch daughter monica is dead?”

The shock was so acute that I overlooked the “txt lingo” and the abrupt manner of the announcement. Her face was familiar because she has deep dimples as did her older sister, my CCC, Uyo school daughter, Ms. Monica Umoren, who passed away on Dec. 24, 2013 in a hospital in Abuja where she had worked as a health statistician. The last time I saw Monica was in January 2008 at my father’s funeral.

Ironically, only the previous day I came across her photo on the back of which she had written two phone numbers. I put the photo in my purse planning to call the following day and hoping they were still active for her. The day of the planned call was also the day that I read of her death. My anguish was accentuated by the fact that I was in Abuja twice last year, including in December, two weeks before her death. I had lost touch with her and wouldn’t have known how to locate her. But I didn’t even think about her the whole time I was in Abuja during those two visits even though I knew she lived there. I still can’t get over that fact.

So here’s my challenge to you: Make contact today with someone (a friend or family member) with whom you haven’t connected in the last six months. Phone, text, e-mail, visit, anything. Do that and we are one gratitude down for today, two to go … and six days to come up with the rest!