Loving Me: Reclaiming My Power

By Letty Chihoro

Most of us have one or more chronic health problems that we accept as being part of growing old or simply as part of life. In many cases we learn to live with taking prescription drugs indefinitely not realising that those drugs could actually create more health problems. By taking this route we give up control of our lives to those who prescribe the drugs. In her book Letty Chihoro discusses the traumas she suffered growing up not only in an apartheid society but in a society where tradition was used as a means of control. You will learn how her resulting emotional issues, coupled with the foods she ate and the prescription drugs she was taking, created or worsened her health problems. She describes how to reverse health issues with changes in the food you eat and with techniques to collapse emotional issues. The book is about reclaiming control of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Letty Chihoro
• Release date: Aug 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476105710

Letty Chihoro

Letty Chihoro was born in 1953 in Southern Rhodesia when it was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. At that time Zambia was known as Northern Rhodesia and Malawi was known as Nyasaland. By the time she went to senior school, Ian Smith had declared his Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and the country was now called Rhodesia. In 1980, after gaining independence from Britain, the country became Zimbabwe. Caught between African traditional practices, Christian fundamentalism and the racism typical of British Colonialism she became impatient with traditional practices, skeptical of Christianity and angry at the racism. Living in such a society, it was inevitable that the standard African diet was dropped in favour of the standard Western diet. Letty grew up with many chronic health issues like allergies and migraines. This was compounded by the anger and self-worth issues that came with living in a society where one race was considered vastly superior to all the others. Through the internet, the ready availability of books, courses and practice she gradually overcame her health challenges and started moving towards peace of mind and mental well-being. Letty lives in the UK, with her family.

Book preview

LOVING ME

Reclaiming my power

By

Letty Chihoro

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Letty Chihoro

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer

This book is purely about my experiences with food and the effect certain foods had on my health. It is not intended to give medical advice. Use of the information provided should be done with the approval of a medical doctor or health care provider.

Foreword by Alison Holden

Director of the Nutritional Healing Foundation

Table of Contents

Foreword

Earliest Memories

First Boarding School

Life on a Farm

Senior Boarding School

Headaches and Allergies

Regaining our Pride

White Boarding School

The end of life as I knew it

Life in London

Work and Further Studies in the UK

Work Life in Zimbabwe

Married Life

Issues

Self-Help

Lessons Learnt

Self-Help Tools

Resources

About the Author

Dedication

To my mum and to all those who suspect that there is more to life than what they are currently experiencing.

Foreword

This book is both an historical account and a self help book. I was spell-bound.

You are drawn into the life of a young black girl living in Zimbabwe, through which you get a fascinating, sometimes shocking insight into the culture, 'traditions' and true reality of living in this country during massive political changes.

Not only do you see Letty grow through her experiences of life on a farm, boarding school, work, moving to London, marriage, children and step children, you see a whole nation regain their pride from a real and honest perspective.

The health theme running throughout this book shows how Letty cures the chronic headaches and allergies that plagued her life. As she comes to realise that her lifestyle and the medication she is taking to 'cure' the symptoms are actually creating them, Letty goes in search of answers, exploring many healing strategies ranging from diet to walking on fire - with a whole host of things in between.

The world needs people who are willing to take whatever ACTION is necessary to get the life and level of health they deserve. It shows the rest of us what is possible when we take responsibility for our lives.

I'm deeply grateful to Letty for sharing her wisdom so beautifully and honestly.

Alison Holden

Director of The Nutritional Healing Foundation

Earliest Memories

Mum, did you hear about the woman who was told by her doctor that she could never get pregnant? When she noticed that her stomach was swelling, she thought she must be ill. She couldn’t believe it when the doctor told her she was pregnant. Isn’t that funny? This was said by my eighteen-year old.

What I thought was funny was the childhood memory that this story triggered. I remember my paternal grandmother complaining bitterly that someone had bewitched her youngest daughter, my Aunt Petronella. What she really meant was that my mother had done it but she couldn’t openly say it to my dad. Her stomach is swelling all on its own, she’d say. I do remember my aunt’s stomach getting bigger over time. I was convinced that one day it would burst and I always made a point of sitting as far away from her as possible. Then one day she came home with a baby boy. She was sixteen at the time.

While recounting this story it struck me that, apart from one paternal cousin, my child had never met anyone from my father’s side of the family. It was more than 35 years since my father’s death and we had never communicated. My father’s death was a traumatic experience for my family and during the weeks following his death we suffered trauma after trauma caused by his relatives.

My earliest memories were of the tension in our household. My paternal grandmother, Grandma Sarah, lived with us and so did some of my father’s sisters. My parents owned a grocery store. They went to the store early in the morning before we woke up and returned long after we had gone to bed. We had a maid called Sarudzai to look after us. Grandma Sarah was always around. She, and her daughters, referred to us as the witch’s children. We could never do anything right. One day my little sister was fretful and she cried a lot. I think she might have been coming down with something. She cried and cried. My older sister, Dorothy, and I were unable to settle her. My grandmother and aunts kept away from us but every now and again they’d come in and tell us to shut the witch’s child up. Dorothy and I were very upset. When our parents got home, we told them everything that had happened and what had been said about our mother. There was a big row between my father and his mother and sisters. For weeks afterwards you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Grandma Sarah and her children barely spoke to us but they did stop calling my mother a witch to our faces.

Grandma Sarah was one of sixteen wives. My paternal grandfather, Grandpa Joseph, was considered a rich man because he had lots of cattle. He never went courting. During times of drought when families went hungry parents would offer their daughters to him in marriage. He was renowned for paying a good bride price in the form of cattle. Grandma Sarah’s older sister was one of his wives who, after several years of marriage, had yet to bear children. Grandma Sarah was offered to Grandpa Joseph as an additional wife (at no cost) to provide him with the children that her sister hadn’t. Grandma Sarah was very bitter about this but she went on to have five children. My father was her only son. Funnily enough, her sister went on to have five children as well. After a while Grandma Sarah had an affair with a man called Jim and she was banished from my grandfather’s homestead. She went to live with her parents. When my parents married she moved in with them.

Grandpa Joseph was a very stern man. I don’t recall him ever smiling but I held him in awe. He got on very well with my mother and they had a deep respect for each other. He spoke many dialects and was a court interpreter. I always remember watching him from afar. He died when I was 10 years old from some type of cancer.

My maternal grandfather, Grandpa Cephas, was a very gentle man, an evangelist. His favourite pastime was praying. He always insisted that we prayed before he went to bed. Before the advent of television we didn’t mind so much but when TV became a part of our lives it became an imposition. He would ask that we say prayers during our favourite TV programme, which usually coincided with his bedtime. It’s time to pray he would say. At first we would just turn down the volume, kneel down and position ourselves so we could watch TV through half-open eyes. One day we were so engrossed that we forgot to say Amen. When my grandfather opened his eyes he found our heads turned towards the TV. From then on he would insist that we switch that thing off.

I never met my maternal grandmother. She died when my mother was very young. She was of mixed race. Her father was Scottish. My mother and her sisters and two brothers were very light skinned like their mother. The other brothers were all dark skinned.

I’ve always wondered why Grandma Sarah disliked my mother so much. I suppose it was because my mother was so different in colouring. If she wasn’t referring to my mother as a witch she was referring to her as a mukaradhi, a derogatory term for those of mixed race.

When my parents met, my mother was a primary school teacher and my father was doing clerical work. In his spare time my father was a photographer. He submitted a picture of my older sister, as a baby, in a photography competition. The prize was a professional camera. My dad won the first prize, left his job and became a full time photographer. His clients frequented the market in Highfields. He would go to the market to take pictures of them and then return a week later with the developed photos. Soon he opened his own photographic studio. He took the photographs and my mum would develop them. In time they had several grocery shops in Highfields.

We lived in a house opposite the Cyril Jennings Hall in Highfields. Visitors were always in and out of our house, usually at mealtimes. One minute our maid would be cooking but when it was time to eat there would be a swarm of people into our yard on the pretext of coming to visit my grandmother. Our meals were very simple then. In the morning we would have sweet mealie (maize) meal porridge followed by a cup of sweet milky tea. When there was bread, we would have buttered or jammed bread with tea. Sometimes Grandma Sarah would make tea with a herb called zumbani (fever tea or lemon bush tea). She would use fresh leaves and the tea would be green in colour. She brewed it in a pot, with sugar and milk. By the time it was ready to drink it would be a milky green, sickly sweet tea that made me heave when I tried to drink it. I’ve always had an acute sense of smell and I found the smell of this tea quite disgusting. As a result I have never cared much for herbal teas.

At lunch time we would have boiled or baked sweet potatoes (baked over hot coals), pumpkin, cooked peanuts or ground nuts, boiled mealies or whatever plant food was in season at the time. In the evenings we would have sadza with a green vegetable stew usually rape or cabbage. Sadza is made from maize meal. You start with maize meal porridge but continue to add meal while it cooks until it is thick enough to roll into a little ball in your hand, without sticking. About once or twice a week we would have a meat and vegetable stew. It was usually when we were having meat that the visitors would suddenly appear. Then we would be divided into groups each with a bowl of sadza and a bowl of stew that had to be shared. The meat would disappear so fast that the younger children, including myself, would end up not having any. I suspect that my cousin Edith had more than her fair share of meat. She was the oldest among us children. Sometimes we would have to share our food with older relatives and we never got to eat any meat. Edith, in desperation, devised a regimented system which made sure we at least had some of everything that had been cooked. She would say Muto muto and we would each dip our ball of sadza into the gravy and eat. In readiness for the next step we would get more sadza and roll into a ball. Then she would say shizha, shizha and we would each pick up a piece of rape or cabbage and eat it with the ball of sadza. Then she would say nyama, nyama and we would each pick up a piece