Chapter one : The adventure begins

I grew up in a place where no child nor an adult would dream of growing or living in, I grew up in the Farms and not just any farms, I grew up in Ventersdorp in the North West, and at that time, racism was still there even though it was supposed to be eradicated, but that was not the problem, the problem was my so called family, I lived  with my grandmother and my cousin, don’t get me wrong I liked my cousin until something happened or was it something he said? Anyway you’ll find out in the end, Firstly here is where my story began
My story began when my mother Kedibone ( I Suffered) got so sick that she couldn’t take it anymore and passed away, anyway that is what I heard because I was a 3 years old and didn’t spend much time with her, it is safe to say that I don’t know her at all and my father, well he ran away when my mother was still pregnant with me and I haven’t heard from him since like forever. I had a brother and a sister but they also ran away and left me with these two people that I mentioned earlier my grandma and cousin. My cousin’s mother worked and lived in Joburg a lot, so she doesn’t play a big part in my story. I Tshepo (Hope) as I was named by my late mother have been to hell and back, no I mean literally to hell!!

I started school like any other normal kids do in the farm school called Mmabatho Primary School and I loved every moment I spent at that school. One day it was raining and really raining and I had to go to school, so I placed my book in a plastic bag so that they don’t get wet, on the other hand I had to walk to school bearfooted, I don’t know how I did it but maybe that was because I had hope and hope for my future,I hoped that one day just one day I will be able to look back and see how far I’ve come and pat myself on the back and say I’m proud of you because of my strong will. I continued with my schooling but to tell you the truth, me and my friends (Ronnie, charles and johannes) were naughty I mean very naughty, remember that I lived on a farm and on a farm there are mielie field, cows, goats and sheeps, so one day on a hot sunny Saturday me and my friends decided to take a walk to the dairy because there were some people working on that day, but when we got there, we didn’t find anyone and then we started to look around and saw that the tank is full of milk that meant they had finished their work but continued to look and finally we saw their lunch boxes, and you know, four hungry and tired kids would do, so we opened them and some of them had Salads, meat and some had only Pap( hard porridge) as we call it in my culture, so we ate the ones with Salads and Meat inside and the ones with only Pap well, remember the tank I told you about, the one with milk inside, we couldn’t only eat pap, so because it was a big tank and the sun is hot, we figured why not because the milk is cold enough, WE JUMPED!! Right inside the tank with our clothes on and we swam and drank the milk at the same time, I know disgusting right but we were just a bunch of kids having fun and believe it or not nobody ever found out what we did. On our way home, we find I find a box of matches, (you know fire matches )we get to my house and just around the house there’s a dry grass so I tell my friends that we play a game with the matches (The person who lights the match and puts out quickly loses and the one who holds it out longest wins), so the game starts and I go first Ronnie goes first,he gets scared and put out the fire, Johannes goes and does the same, so I wanted to prove to them that I can do it, so I grab the matches from johannes’s hands and I lit the match and then I tell them to leave it a bit and then they start to panic because the fire was getting big, so I also start to panic and then I try to put it out but then the wind started to pick up, and now we knew we were in trouble, we used bricks, bottles and cans to put it out but we couldn’t so we ran and the fire raged out of control burning everything in its path ,trees, grass and mielie fields, the owner came and called the fire department but the fire had already done the damage. Then one of the people who were helping saw me running and chased after me because I couldn’t run fast enough and my friends were long gone and eventually I was caught , and I begged, I sreamed and kicked so that he would let me go because I knew that I will be in trouble if I was taken to the owner, but then he put me down and told me to go home, I have never been so releaved in my life and I promised myself that I would never do something so stupid again. On my holidays in December my grandma told me and Michael that we were moving to Klerksdorp in the township called Kanana, so we packed everything and told our best friends that we will meet again soon and that was my last month in Palmietfontein Ventersdorp……Not knowing that more difficult challenges lay ahead…..