Determined to Help Others – Thapson Phiri

My arrival at African Christian College brought a lot of questions: How I will live with new people. How will I adapt to a new environment? These seemed to be hard questions to respond to, but on the first day of orientation, I got the responses. I saw smiley and welcoming faces from my lectures, staff members, Tree of Life (TOL) workers, and my fellow students. The new environment was suddenly transformed into being like home. It was like I have been in Eswatini for some years yet it was just a few days.

As we were progressing with orientations, I was so impressed with the powerful presentation made by the President of African Christian College, Brad Carter. He was teaching us about the “Big stones first,” which was about keeping your priorities straight. After I got this, I had to think about my big stone. I realized that my big stone is school. Since January 2018, school has been on top of every activity I had to do. As time went on, schoolwork was becoming too much and I felt like giving up, so I had to recall “Big stone first” and stood strong.

I had a great time participating in sports. I grew up believing that I cannot play soccer, but this negative belief changed in 2018 when we had a soccer game for students versus staff members. It was my first time to play a game since childhood, and I didn’t believe in myself that I can. Good coach Justice Nherera advised me that I can and he said I have to make training a routine. He used to knock on my door at 05:00 am before I go to class to go for running to gain my fitness.

This was a terrible time ever, but I couldn’t give up until I adapted to this way of living. I kept on training each day and eventually became a good team player. It was so interesting to see myself playing 90 minutes without being substituted by anybody. We won two tournaments and I got two medals.  This taught me that it is not good to hold onto a negative belief because it may limit you from learning new things, and I believe that there is nothing that we cannot learn in life.

I have learnt a lot from the courses that I have studied. I have been equipped with theological ideas, psychological ideas as well as an entrepreneurial mindset. As I will be going out to the world soon, I will be able to preach the gospel and equip people about God’s expectations from us. I will be able to help people who are suffering from trauma and different psychological issues to face the reality of their problems and find good solutions. It is my hope and aim to help more youths to make right choices that will help them in future to have a healthy life and good relationship with God. All this will be done by putting God first in everything and apply the knowledge I have learned in class and outside class in three years of being at African Christian College.