What do the following men have in common? Persian Ustad-Ahmad Lahori, the chief architect of the Taj Mahal mausoleum in India; Danish Jørn Utzon, the architect of Sydney Opera House in Australia; Japanese Satoshi Kashima, the engineer who designed the approximately two-kilometre long Akashi Kaikyō, the world’s longest suspension bridge found in Kobe, Japan and South African Christiaan Barnard, the cardiac surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human heart transplant.
All of them were once children. Their guardians did not abdicate their responsibility. They took good care of them. Protected them. Guided them. Encouraged them to reach for the stars. And they did! In their own different ways. Lesson? For as long as we do the same for our children, they too will rise and conquer the world. In their own way of course. Amongst other things, we need to protect our children from child abuse otherwise we will run the risk of exposing them to a traumatic lifespan fraught with negative self-image and compromised self-respect. A case in point is Gaone*, the 42-year-old woman who is struggling with releasing the painful pent up emotions that she has always suppressed from childhood. She often walks around with a flicker of a fake smile on her face, a thin fragile grin that barely masks the cumulative effect of years of physical pain, mental wretchedness, dejection, depression and extreme emotional agony.
