Stop Sitting on Your Greatness: How One Woman Embraced Her Failures and Became Unstoppable

By Mamma Stella Chebe

From poverty in a West African village to wealth in America, Stella Chebe's story shows how one woman harnessed adversity to fuel a life of success and fulfillment. Discover how you can also. Stop Sitting on Your Greatness will inspire you to release the locked-in beliefs and worries of failure that hold you back from achieving what you desire most in life. Through Chebe's personal journey of tenacity and grit against all odds, you will learn how to use your God-given power of wisdom, creativity, physical vitality, and relationship with yourself and others to realize your goals and to not give up on what really matters to you. In this powerful story and its thought-provoking life lessons you will find the courage to embrace who you really are. Here is inspirational writing that stokes the body and imagination. It reads autobiographical, but the ingenious construction and the stay-up-late suspense offer irresistible and indispensable counseling to all who care about a fulfilling future. -Peter Suh-Nfor Tangyie, Writer-Critic-Actor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645154822

Book preview

Chapter 1

Insight: We are responsible for what we do, not somebody else.

Before I was unlucky, I was a miracle. At least, that is what my mother called me when I was born June 19, 1976, her third child—weak, tired, and barely able to cry. By some miracle, I made it out alive and survived through those first weeks of life. But, eight months after I came into the world, I was back in the hands of physicians, my health dangerously in jeopardy, my small body ridden with chicken pox, though the local health professionals didn’t make that diagnosis at the time. To them, suddenly and with no explanation, I went from being barely healthy to a seriously sick, feverish baby who had trouble breathing.

It is no exaggeration to say the odds were against me. My parents lived in Bafut, a semi-rural region, one of the largest in the northwest region of Cameroon, West Africa. Yet we had no hospital nearby, and the clinic where I had been born was an insufficient medical substitute. With no reliable electric power flow, no cars available, and a terrified mother unsure of what to do, the pox had already spread across my entire body by the time she was able to seek help.

To make matters worse, it was our raining season. Torrential down pours on already precarious dirt roads made transportation more difficult. Even with a car, we would most likely have been stuck or delayed trying to maneuver miles and miles through the mud to the nearest hospital.

But, to my mother, it seemed as though the miracles happened around me. First, thank goodness, my mother’s brother—a driver for a local nonprofit organization and always ready to help—had a four-wheel-drive, pick-up truck. How they communicated with him to come to our aid, especially in an age before cellular and even landline phones were in our area, was beyond me. Normally, if you wanted to communicate to the whole village, the Fon (king), our leader, would play drums to call everyone together. They didn’t do that for me, though, so I have no idea how my uncle got the message. Yet, there he was, able to drive me and my mother, scared and anxious, to the Acha hospital in another city.

At the hospital, the staff started treatments for malaria, thinking that was what I had because of my fever and the vomiting, but it was too late, the chicken pox had already manifested itself on the inside, and no one could see it. With limited medical knowledge, the doctors and nurses attempted what seemed like trial and error, trial and error, and still more trial and error since none of it took. People die everyday in the hospitals of Cameroon because of misdiagnoses and wrong medications. We don’t have the equipment and infrastructure, and sometimes, the doctors aren’t really doctors at all, having received their medical approval from an uncle in a position of power. It is a miracle I even survived.

I was growing weaker and losing more weight. My body had made no response to the treatments. Day after long worrisome day, they would treat me, wait and see, and then try again. After four months in the hospital, my mother knew without a doubt if this lasted much longer she was going to lose me.

Every day she was terrified; she would wake and find me lifeless. I was severely dehydrated, and even with an IV to keep me going, I didn’t want to eat. At the same time, she marveled at how my little body kept fighting the illness inside. I would spent my first birthday in a hospital room fighting for my life.

The next miracle emerged as a visiting American doctor had come to Cameroon for an internship. Luckily, I was one of the patients on her consultation rounds. She noticed something the other physicians had missed and changed my medication. The vomiting and the diarrhea stopped immediately, which made this the first time they knew what had been bothering me. While the rashes took months to disappear, I could finally eat again, and I gained energy. My mother said I became alive, and when she put me on the floor, I was all over the place. That was the normal Stella!

At some point, they drew a dark fluid from my spinal cord, and for the first time in my young life, I slept through the night. I started improving, and then thriving. Miracle or no miracle, I think it is here that my fighter’s heart was born. I had always been too weak and sickly before to walk like most babies did at that stage. After that period of recovery, at twelve months old, I stood up and started walking.

My mother told me she had never seen someone so determined to live. I fought, no matter what was going on.

My mother had a fighter heart too.

Eight months earlier, when her labor pains had come, my mother, Margaret Mankaa, had been outside, laboring on our farm. She and my father, Shu Abel, had been married for four years, they were already the parents of two young children (my eldest brother, Edwin, and my sister, Vivian), and had begun cultivating cassava, cocoyam, and ginger. The economic state in Cameroon in the late 1970s and 1980s was dire. Though he held a position of great social respect and authority in Cameroon, that of a teacher, my father struggled to provide for his small but growing family on his salary alone. So farming on the seven acres of land we owned near our home was a necessity as it brought us not only an extra income from the sale of whatever my mother had harvested, but it meant, too, that our family could eat.

As she dug ginger root from the ground, my mother doubled over from pain, realizing nothing was going to stop this one: I was ready to be born. With her big, pregnant belly, she walked, already tired from the physical exertion of her work and baking in the sweltering heat, more than half a mile to the nearest health center. Today, I still marvel at the strength and determination of this African woman I call Mammi.

In the health clinic where I was born, the women in the beds on either side of my mother had given birth to twins. Because my mother had had only one child, she did not want the twins to have powers over me. You see, back home, there’s a common long-held cultural belief that twins have supernatural powers and are always busy working their mischievous tricks on those around them. To make sure I would be protected from not one, but two pairs of twins, my mother did the only thing she thought would counteract the sinister, doubly powerful influence of these two sets of newborns: she named me as a twin.

My western or English-speaking name is Stella meaning star. My father believed I was a star and my traditional name bears the suffix, nwi, meaning God (referencing supernatural powers) and implying twin. In Africa, I am called Binwi. This name means I would overcome the potentially evil challenge posed by the twins who shared the same week of birth and the same birthing room with me. My mother saw to it that in my name alone, I would possess the double strength I needed as a twin-named, single-birth child to be able to protect myself and, ultimately, live.

Throughout my life, and to this day, Cameroonian people who see my traditional name written and notice the nwi, inquire about my twin. I am often surprised they think about it because I never believed this cultural omen. In Africa, the myth is a very big thing, and twins are believed to have the power to turn into snakes and cause a lot of bad things.

I don’t know why I didn’t believe the myth, but I just didn’t buy it. When I was growing up, any trouble with schoolwork or illness or anything even remotely negative would be blamed on the twin’s attempts to sabotage aspects of my life. But I always said, No, I don’t believe it. Just because you gave me that name doesn’t mean they influenced me. Maybe it was because of the evil twin that Stella can’t spell her name, my mother or father would say. As a precocious child, I would always be the contrary outspoken voice arguing back, How can that be the twins? It doesn’t make sense. Show me, prove it to me! I don’t think that’s true.

I was just being who I was. I wanted to discover things myself. I used more common sense rather than bookwork. My parents were both trained as teachers, and they expected me to follow directions and be smart in school, but I did neither, so they didn’t know what to do with me but blame it on the twins. Yet, I knew the evil twin wasn’t Stella, and that kept me going. I had an evil twin that did not exist in the back of my head.

Still, I like to think the idea of being one and yet named for and endowed with the powers of two is another miracle. This duality allowed me to survive being harmed with my skepticism fully in tact. Skepticism drives me. If I’m not skeptical about something, it’s not worth doing, in my opinion. If I’m skeptical of the outcome, if I have questions or if I don’t know the answers, then I want to know. I’m interested in learning; I’m compelled to learn.

And, though I am named for two, I think critically and independently as one. Critical thinking wasn’t a normal personality trait in Africa in those days. In Africa, we were told what to do. We couldn’t raise our voices or argue with our parents, not like in America, where kids are free to talk and be fully self-expressed. But the belief of the twins could not influence what I saw in the physical form. To me, the math didn’t work. I wasn’t two, I was one. No one could make me feel something else. I could speak for myself and no one else. That gave me wisdom. I will look at issues from two-sided, but I am not a two-sided person. It is either I am in, or I am out.

I do believe I am responsible for what I am doing, not somebody else, not an evil twin, which has helped me a lot, and I am teaching my kids that it is no one else’s fault but theirs. If I had believed in the superstition of twins, I would have never accomplished what I have because I would have been focusing on blaming someone or something else and not taking responsibility. People have different personalities. I wasn’t a normal personality in Africa in those days, but the diversity taught me to thrive. Enjoy the difference of who you are.

The tendency to blame our parents, relatives, hierarchy for our failings, or not having a job, not getting a spouse, not knowing who you are, is born out of too much dependence on others. We need to wake up to the potentials within us and to have greater responsibility for what we do or desire.

Inquiry:

Who are you?

How are you different?

How do others view you?

What are the miracles of your personality?

What miracles have you encountered in your life?

Chapter 2

Insight: Edit your past, learn from the past, and embrace your past qualities that empower you.

Bafut was a quintessentially rural area, and one of the small villages in the northwest region. Nowadays, Bafut has grown into an administrative subdivision with modern houses being built all over; but when I was a child, a few farms and houses lined the little dirt roads and were built with sundry blocks, with roofs of grass and muds, and a few zinc fillings. Our floors were not even cemented.

But there was nothing like the urban community life. We were the neighbors’ keeper, and everyone would help take care of each other. Everybody is somebody else’s people back home, and I miss that feeling here in America where often we don’t even know our neighbors.

Our house was near the main road, a main highway of sorts that connected Bafut to the next subdivision or town. Down the street was the church where we went every Sunday, and it was the best house on the street and could fit two hundred people inside. In contrast, our house was very little. It was like a three-bedroom apartment built with mud bricks and housed our entire family. My grandparents’ section contained the living room and kitchen where everyone gathered to eat and spend time in the evening. Our section was a one small living room and two bedrooms, my dad and mom slept in one, and all kids slept in the other room.

The third section of our compound was for my uncle and his kids. Behind the house was about an acre of land for farming, and lots of palm and guava trees grew, so when we were hungry, we’d simply pick fruit during that fruit’s season, assuming it was the season. Because this farmland was linked to the compound, it was easy for my mother to farm and us, the kids, to help her. On other days, she would walk miles to farm the seven acres of land that she cultivated with her friends. When I was seven, I had to go straight to the farm after school and help my mom finish her work. She’d sell some of her goods, and some she’d save for our family to eat. Because our compound was on the main road connecting two towns, it was easier for her to make money selling her produce. Sometimes, we would stand by the road, with no shoes and wave, excited, just to see a car passing by.

Today, Cameroon as a whole still lacks sufficient paved, drivable roads. So think of it as almost four decades ago. During the dry season, for instance, the roads are dusty while in the wet season they are muddy and difficult to use. The kids would play football, or soccer, on the roads and when a passing car came by, the dust would whip into the air and cover us. At one point, my grandfather planted cypress trees in a line, like a fence in our front yard, to keep cars from running into houses and to block out the dust from flying into our compound. When a car passed and kicked up dust, it would then get into the cypress tress rather than everywhere else in our house. When the first rains came, the water barely absorbed into the ground because the dust was too thick and dry. While in the dry season dust flew everywhere, in the rainy season, once the rainwater eventually penetrated the ground, there was nothing but mud.

As a child, I had to go to the nearby streams or spring to