How are the holidays going?
Enjoying yourselves?
Did you head home to the parents or decided to say in the city? If you did, ‘how are the old people?’
Enough with the pleasantries; let me open your eyes to the loneliness our elderly people are facing.
Without people to take care of, our parents and grandparents are fading away with loneliness and all the diseases that come with it.
Surely you must have witnessed a brightness and happy face when they saw you pull up in the drive way with the children.
Did you feel the longing in their speech as they greeted you, of how they have missed you throughout the year? Did you feel their need for you to stay longer than you had planned with them?
Have you realized that we no longer send our children to be nurtured, guided and looked after by our parents as they did us? I am not saying we are not good parents but ‘wise counsel to the younger is a duty of the aged (Joel 1:2-3)’ and our parents are wiser than us.
Visiting only during the Christmas holidays is of great joy to them, but what about when its not? Do we still send our children to them during the school breaks? What about during Easter holidays? Or we just call and wish them well?
“They are old’ we tell ourselves, ‘they can’t handle our lives filled with technology’how deceitful.
With the above thought we are killing our elderly and we know it!
Did you see this? https://www.facebook.com/ugandagrandmothers/
We leave them with our empty rooms filled with our childhood echoes, big compounds littered with our footsteps and walk ways that keep them hoping…
Hoping for the day, we will return with our children and spend time with them, to let them teach us their ways and us our new found ones.
We need to invest in our parents as they grow old, the same way they did us.
Think about it…..
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True. Very true. The question is how.
We find them skills that can keep them engaged and involved in the movement of development… like baby sitting, house keeping and teaching centers…
Good thoughts