A Long and Restless Journey in Pursuit of Happiness with Empty Hands of Faith: An Authoritative Resource for Bushfallers

A Long And Restless Journey In Pursuit Of Happiness With Empty Hands Of Faith

An Authoritative Resource for Bushfallers

Making the Best Experimenting Living Overseas

H. Baté Agbor-Baiyee

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© 2012 by H. Baté Agbor-Baiyee. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Note: Except where otherwise indicated, references to Scriptures in this book are taken from the New American Standard Bible (Ultrathin Reference Edition) ®, Copyright © 1998 by the Lockman Foundation (www.Lockman.org). Used with authorization.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/18/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-4774-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-4773-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012901604

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Contents

Dedication

About The Author

Bushfaller Defined

Gratitudes

Preface

Chapter One      Conquering Anxiety And Fear

Chapter Two      Ensuring A Tidy Takeoff

Chapter Three      Prayer As The Game-Changer

Chapter Four      Picking A Place Of Residence

Chapter Five      Finding A Church Home

Chapter Six      Pace Yourself

Chapter Seven      Immersing In Your New Culture

Chapter Eight      Marriage Matters

Chapter Nine      Men: Lead Your Homes

Chapter Ten      Discipleship Of Children

Chapter Eleven      Investing In School

Chapter Twelve      The Value Of Public Libraries

Chapter Thirteen      Dealing with The Police

Chapter Fourteen      Surviving A Rancorous Immigration Climate

Chapter Fifteen      Winning Against Racism And Prejudice

Chapter Sixteen      Drugs And Alcohol

Chapter Seventeen      Personal Grooming

Chapter Eighteen      Visiting Your Physician

Chapter Nineteen      Raison D’etre For Life Insurance

Chapter Twenty      Keeping The Faith

Chapter Twenty-One      Conclusion

Bibliography

Dedication

This collection honors and celebrates the heroic travails of beloved brothers and sisters, Africa’s promise and Africa’s hope, who are absconding their ancestral homeland due to cruel and suffocating existential realities. With mettle, faith, and reason, they are surmounting the manacles of indignity, oppression, and servitude induced by corrupt and barbarous political regimes. Their names and faces may be anonymous, but the spirit of their valor will live on evermore. Their bravery and sacrifices will forever be engraved in the annals of a rare brand of African freedom-fighters. Their agonizing encounter with life’s vagaries has not gone unnoticed by God.

About The Author

H. Baté Agbor-Baiyee is the bestselling author of The Little Sparks in Me: A Random Collection of Poems and Reflections. He is a widely travelled free thinker and African public intellectual from Manyu Division, in the Cameroons. He is an activist, social critic, militant humanist of sorts whose routinely nuanced and measured perspective on contemporary diasporan ‘issues’, the Bible, government, globalization, culture, race, and world peace appear on various on-line media outlets. He is a bushfaller. He and his family currently reside in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio where he works at Kent State University in Ohio, U.S.A. He divides his time between various community service endeavors and hanging out with his kids. Via email Baté can be reached at agborbaiyee@gmail.com.

Bushfaller Defined

Bushfaller is a term of endearment that signify in/voluntary mass-dispersion or migration of a people with common roots to countries in North America or Europe in search of a more purposeful life. A bushfaller is a marginalized, disillusioned, and freedom-seeking young person or youth from the Cameroons who is imbued with creative energy, intellectual capacity or academic attainments in most cases, entrepreneurial impulses, as well as a proclivity to endure risks travelling overseas to industrialized countries searching for a ‘better life’. By hook or by crook, the bushfaller is determined to escape the oppressive and squalid conditions of all aspects of life experienced in their homelands. While overseas, bushfallers tend to sustain strong cultural and relational affinity with their birthplace. For the most part, they view the ancestral homeland as their true home, to which they mythically nurse high hopes, at least desires, to someday return should the homeland democratizes politically and become economically prosperous.

Bushfallers are not elites, haute bourgeoisies or petulant spoiled touristic brats who leisurely take safari trips overseas for want of opportunities to squander ill-gotten fortune conned from the national treasury by their kleptocratic parents or relatives. Bushfallers are all-season drifters who are packing and going, leaving little or nothing behind. Migrating abroad to unfamiliar and most often hostile circumstances for these unsurrendering bruised souls is a make-or-break endeavor that must be urgently pursued. They are poised for the uncertain yet are unequivocally optimistic about God of Heaven’s amazing plan for them.

Gratitudes

Imperfections in this book are mine and mine alone. While I assume total responsibility for this effort, many individuals and entities played crucial roles in facilitating its conception and ultimate realization. Writing can be an exasperating and lonesome pursuit, which explains why I must earnestly register my gratefulness with those who, with their heads and hearts, offered shrewd ideas and vigorous encouragements.

First off, I wish to thank Susan Marquardt Blystone for her careful and thoughtful attention to the editorial and structural details of this work. Her gifts with words and organization of ideas are impeccable.

In addition, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to my African diasporic scholar-siblings, Dr. William Agbor-Baiyee, Dr. Baiyee-Mbi Agbor-Baiyee, and Dr. Martha Baiyee whose keen intellectual insights greatly enhanced the overall quality of this book. Our very many thoughtful, passionate, soulful, and often blisteringly funny conversations about the issues helped fine tune and calibrate the core of my thoughts in this volume. Your constant inspirations, helpful criticisms, and solicitous suggestions at every juncture of the writing meant the world. I marvel at the heft of your minds and your own personal resilience amidst odds here in this foreign land. To each of you my appreciation is deep and enduring.

Casting the gratitude net even wider, I would like to also doff the hat to innumerable fellow bushfallers and collaborators whose action-packed personal stories transmitted through emails, phone calls, and face-to-face encounters helped illuminate the direction and flavor of this book. When I initially contemplated this book, I knew I would take a lot of perspectives from fellow bushfallers. Despite your hectic schedules, many of you fire-eating bushfallers showed nothing but refinement and cordiality in trading ideas with me. Thank you for providing a steady stream of narratives about your personal and most often private encounters with the ebb and flow of Yankee life. Buddies, your good humor, cheer, toughness, and faith in God have been an inspiration. Thanks for sharing with me so much that is so deep, personal and at times clandestine. Your chronicles are demonstrative of the relevance of this book.

With an eternity of gratitude, I am indebted to you my adored children—Taku-Regu, Agbor-Nkamba, Baté-Mone Jr., and Mfortaw—for your authentic and categorical love. Your unconditional kindness and companionship in every step of my life means so much. Your unadulterated love is what has guaranteed me the much desired stamina necessary to wrestle the onslaught of alienation, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear here abroad.

And finally, above and beyond everything else, I must acknowledge the Lord for His love and grace. That I am a recipient of the unique calling to write this book is evidence of His awesomeness. While I am not an expert in anything, I do know that He can inspire. Thanks for the inspiration of this book, Father. As I age, it is increasingly apparent how undeserving I am to receive all that I am and have which takes me to this verse, With God’s power working in us, God can do much, much more than anything we can ask or imagine Ephesians 3: 20.

H. Baté Agbor-Baiyee

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 2012

Preface

This is a book about living and surviving. It is a book that broaches critical values such as; immigration, hope, family, determination, diversity, violence, love, redemption, and humanism. It is a collection of short provocative essays about daring fellows buried in an avalanche of fear, anxiety and hopelessness meted on them by a succession of maniacal authoritarian governments. It is a subjective commentary about vessels of crushing wrath similar to nomadic herdsmen who are uprooting themselves, abandoning essential psychosocial and cultural networks, breaking family and kinship ties drifting overseas to the Western Hemisphere in search of a meaningful existence. These shattered souls are poised to unshackle themselves from their stifled ghettoized reality in order to sustain a richer and deeper personhood. They are aware that to be victorious in life without incurring risks or enduring some form of pain is similar to being triumphant without glory. Even in the face of overwhelming odds, they are ready to rise above their calamities and traumas cheerfully like veritable champs. These globalized citizens have learned to cultivate an exceptional tenacity of spirit, character and personal responsibility that allows them to take on the vicissitudes in life with raw courage and patience without surrendering. They are holding onto U.S. President Bill Clinton’s modest pearl of wisdom suggesting that ‘if you voluntarily quit in the face of adversity; you will regret for the rest of your life.’ They have also embraced the words in Deuteronomy 31:6, I am strong and of good courage, I do not fear nor am I afraid, for the Lord my God, He is the one who goes with me. He will not leave me or forsake me. They know that life is a complex juxtaposition of redemption and disillusionments which explains the enticement for bushfallers to explore new dimensions of purposeful living across the globe. They know that in order to be prosperous and contented, they need