Before reading this post i am very confident you must have heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” well you are about to hear a story of how I judged a book by its cover.
I want to share something I learnt while away on the farm with you guys. This is a true story that happened to me, I can remember the story vividly this is because it happened very recently. If you have been following my blog you will see a post on how Harvested our Soya beans. The work on the farm was too much to be done by only a few people so we decided to employ laborers to help us harvest the soya beans faster.
The first group of people we employed were from a nearby village around our farm. They were 7 men who were supposed to help in uprooting the soya beans. In other to come to an agreement on how much we would pay them. We needed to communicate with each other. I asked them if they understood English they said no. The only dilate we could communicate very well was Dagbani and Twi. So we stroke the deal and they did their part.
Fast forward to the winnowing, we employed three women for the job. Two women were quite old enough to be our mothers the other one was a bit of our age. So my brother wanted to get friendly with the younger one. His Dagbani and Twi wasn’t as great as mine. So he wanted to speak English to the girl and I was like these people are not illiterates can’t you see that the first people we hired couldn’t speak.? So I said this out loud in English to my brother.
So he asked me to give his number to her. She didn’t have anything to write the number on. So she said I should just mention it. She would remember it. I laughed out loud. And said even a student like me I wouldn’t be able to do that not to talk of you. But I just mentioned it anyway. So the next day they came for work.
And my brother was like you didn’t give the number to her because she didn’t call and I was like maybe she forgot so I confronted her and she said her phone was off. And I said it’s because she forgot the number that’s why. To my surprise, she mentioned the number without messing up. And I just opens my jaws completely blown out.
What even shocked me more was the fact that she spoke fluent English. She was like “I understood everything you said you were quick to judge me based on other people and how she appeared to work”. I didn’t know what to say. So my bro stepped in and asked her level of education and she said you just graduated with a first class in Statistics. She is only here to get something small because they weren’t any jobs coming in.
I learnt a very valuable lesson that day not to judge anyone before getting to know them or speaking with them. Just because most of the people we encountered were illiterates I assumed she was too but it turned out she wasn’t and I felt Kind of ashamed.