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The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) - Travel (11) - Nairaland

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Nigerian Nurse & His Fiancée Die In Motor Accident 6 Weeks After Engagement / Narrative Of A Journey From Sokoto To Akwa Ibom / Adventures Of A UK Bound Nurse (2) (3) (4)

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:26pm On Jun 11, 2020
Cyrilade01:
Wow,am well informed
OP, u are a good writer
Pls I would like to ask a few questions
I have 2 kids,can I also file for my mum to get a visa instead of getting a nanny over there?
Also what are your reasons for UK n not US
THANKS
I believe you can invite your mum through a visiting Visa, but you cannot apply for a tier 2 dependant for her because the sponsorship does not cover such. I have a friend that did something like that. She has been here for sometime while her Children were with her mum as the main Carer in Ghana. Last year she decided to bring her Children over to the UK. She applied for the children as tier 2 dependants while she applied for the mother on a 6 months visiting Visa, She noted on the application that the children will be coming with her mum.
I love UK than US, and the application process is shorter and less cumbersome.

7 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by EbonyCy(f): 6:36pm On Jun 11, 2020
@soknown pls wat path can a 3rd class anatomy follow to finally end in nursing here in Nigeria..
I don't have money or sponsor for abroad yet unless its scholarship which I doubt will work out cos of age(I'm 32)

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 7:10pm On Jun 11, 2020
EbonyCy:
@soknown pls wat path can a 3rd class anatomy follow to finally end in nursing here in Nigeria..
I don't have money or sponsor for abroad yet unless its scholarship which I doubt will work out cos of age(I'm 32)
Frankly, you can pick a JAMB form and study Nursing. Age is not a barrier.

4 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by lillaowow(m): 9:58pm On Jun 11, 2020
Soknown:

Frankly, you can pick a JAMB form and study Nursing. Age is not a barrier.

Question.

Wife, a nurse lives in Nigeria with 2kids, .

Hubby, a doctor lives in another country.

Wife will be applying for UK visa and moving to the UK most likely after the lockdown.

Hubby wants to join her.

How would you advise they process their work visa to the UK

Should hubby apply where he is or travel back to Nigeria for that?.

Thanks.
Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 1:29pm On Jun 12, 2020
lillaowow:


Question.

It is a matter of fastest fingers finger first.
If he has done his GMC and other relevant exams, he can apply for the family otherwise you can apply for the whole family on your sponsorship.
The part i am not sure of is the submission of documents and Biometric screening, dunno if it can be done in separate countries on single application. Possibly you can make two applications, one for yourself and children for submission within Nigeria, then the other for him to submit his documents in the country where he is.
Please @Justwise what will you advise?

2 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by justwise(m): 8:16pm On Jun 12, 2020
Soknown:

It is a matter of fastest fingers finger first.
If he has done his GMC and other relevant exams, he can apply for the family otherwise you can apply for the whole family on your sponsorship.
The part i am not sure of is the submission of documents and Biometric screening, dunno if it can be done in separate countries on single application. Possibly you can make two applications, one for yourself and children for submission within Nigeria, then the other for him to submit his documents in the country where he is.
Please @Justwise what will you advise?

I would have said the same thing.

4 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 11:27am On Jun 13, 2020
justwise:


I would have said the same thing.
Thank you.
Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Cyrilade01: 11:21pm On Jun 13, 2020
Soknown:

I believe you can invite your mum through a visiting Visa, but you cannot apply for a tier 2 dependant for her because the sponsorship does not cover such. I have a friend that did something like that. She has been here for sometime while her Children were with her mum as the main Carer in Ghana. Last year she decided to bring her Children over to the UK. She applied for the children as tier 2 dependants while she applied for the mother on a 6 months visiting Visa, She noted on the application that the children will be coming with her mum.
I love UK than US, and the application process is shorter and less cumbersome.



Thanks for the response
God bless

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by lillaowow(m): 2:31am On Jun 14, 2020
Soknown:

It is a matter of fastest fingers finger first.
If he has done his GMC and other relevant exams, he can apply for the family otherwise you can apply for the whole family on your sponsorship.
The part i am not sure of is the submission of documents and Biometric screening, dunno if it can be done in separate countries on single application. Possibly you can make two applications, one for yourself and children for submission within Nigeria, then the other for him to submit his documents in the country where he is.
Please @Justwise what will you advise?

That's what I think too. I just don't know how to advise the family.

Thanks for your input

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 10:26am On Jun 28, 2020
Sometimes in July i got a call from the water company, Ses wanting me to supply the water readings and i informed them that i could not find the meter, I could sense some doubts from the customer agents. I told her that i have looked everywhere within the flats, i could not find anything. She asked if the meter could be outside, i told her to tell me if that were possible. She said yes. So we agreed that she could arrange to send an engineer to look around on a date that i will be available. On the said date, the engineer came around and searched places where meters could be but find none. He went to the street to search for non-domiciled meters which in his words are not plausible for a flat, non-domiciled meters could be installed for a detached or semi-detached house but not for flats in a terraced building especially old ones, anyways he looked outside but could not find it, he came back to me to that he would discuss with the company.
So the bills came later, i called them to have a meter installed. The agents then checked the records for the flat and came back that the house could not be metered. So i told her of the regulations that if the house is not metered and could not be metered due to no fault of the tenants, the company should reduce the rate and the bill. She agreed and told me not to pay the bill until the new and adjusted rate and bill is sent to me. So two weeks later a reduced monthly bill was sent which i paid immediately and also set up a direct debit to pay automatically.
Still talking about bills, the council contacted me with my account number for the council tax and advised that i should set up a direct debit. The council tax incorporates bills for the county council, borough council, Adult social care, and Surrey police, about £1700/an for the property band which is band c. Since i am going to start paying in August, the bill was spread over seven months, which means i will be paying about £182/cm. I decided not to set up the direct debit at least for the first payment, i wanted to check how payment over the counter would be. Well i went to the post office and the clerk scanned the bar code on the bill and i just paid with the card.
Schools resumed in early September, my lovelies started going to school. They have watched cartoons meant for a whole year, i cannot blame them. If i had constant light and wifi at their age i would have done the same thing. The first few weeks were hectic for them and the family, new environment, new faces, new learning methods, new food. Children are more perceptive and amenable than adults, so they adapted quickly and made new friends, there are a lot of black and minority ethnic children in the school.
Early September, the family decided we need to move to a less expensive location, we started searching around and asking questions. Luckily my wife's former boss who has relocated to the UK told us that there is a vacancy in her nhs trust the vacancy was for band 6 and 5. I applied through the NHS jobs site, i went for the interview. The interview involved making PowerPoint presentations on the topic sent to all applicants. Followed by questions and answer time. When it was time for me to ask questions, i asked about Staff retention, Staff support plans, Career progression support.
I did not get the band 6 because but a friend from within the trust got it, I asked for feedback on my performance with the interview, the feedback was mainly positive but i failed one of the questions in Mental capacity act. So i was employed as Band 5. I arranged to have my Mental health CBT, i studied for it within two weeks, sat for the exam, and passed. I informed my ward manager of my plans, she was sad. She asked if there is anything she could do for me to stay. I told her my plans are in advance stage. But i informed her that the new employe could contact her for reference. She said she will be happy to write a robust reference.
Then NMC decided to tweak with the online registration platform to make it better, but the new updates on the site do not support persons with an existing pin looking for registration for a second pin. So i could not progress with my registration, I made the new employer aware of this development.
The offer of employment and contract papers were sent to me through the post which i signed and returned.
The next hurdle is the application for a new Visa.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Richdee1(m): 11:04am On Jun 28, 2020
Soknown:
Sometimes in July i got a call from the water company, Ses wanting me to supply the water readings and i informed them that i could not find the meter, I could sense some doubts from the customer agents. I told her that i have looked everywhere within the flats, i could not find anything. She asked if the meter could be outside, i told her to tell me if that were possible. She said yes. So we agreed that she could arrange to send an engineer to look around on a date that i will be available. On the said date, the engineer came around and searched places where meters could be but find none. He went to the street to search for non-domiciled meters which in his words are not plausible for a flat, non-domiciled meters could be installed for a detached or semi-detached house but not for flats in a terraced building especially old ones, anyways he looked outside but could not find it, he came back to me to that he would discuss with the company.
So the bills came later, i called them to have a meter installed. The agents then checked the records for the flat and came back that the house could not be metered. So i told her of the regulations that if the house is not metered and could not be metered due to no fault of the tenants, the company should reduce the rate and the bill. She agreed and told me not to pay the bill until the new and adjusted rate and bill is sent to me. So two weeks later a reduced monthly bill was sent which i paid immediately and also set up a direct debit to pay automatically.
Still talking about bills, the council contacted me with my account number for the council tax and advised that i should set up a direct debit. The council tax incorporates bills for the county council, borough council, Adult social care, and Surrey police, about £1700/an for the property band which is band c. Since i am going to start paying in August, the bill was spread over seven months, which means i will be paying about £182/cm. I decided not to set up the direct debit at least for the first payment, i wanted to check how payment over the counter would be. Well i went to the post office and the clerk scanned the bar code on the bill and i just paid with the card.
Schools resumed in early September, my lovelies started going to school. They have watched cartoons meant for a whole year, i cannot blame them. If i had constant light and wifi at their age i would have done the same thing. The first few weeks were hectic for them and the family, new environment, new faces, new learning methods, new food. Children are more perceptive and amenable than adults, so they adapted quickly and made new friends, there are a lot of black and minority ethnic children in the school.
Early September, the family decided we need to move to a less expensive location, we started searching around and asking questions. Luckily my wife's former boss who has relocated to the UK told us that there is a vacancy in her nhs trust the vacancy was for band 6 and 5. I applied through the NHS jobs site, i went for the interview. The interview involved making PowerPoint presentations on the topic sent to all applicants. Followed by questions and answer time. When it was time for me to ask questions, i asked about Staff retention, Staff support plans, Career progression support.
I did not get the band 6 because but a friend from within the trust got it, I asked for feedback on my performance with the interview, the feedback was mainly positive but i failed one of the questions in Mental capacity act. So i was employed as Band 5. I arranged to have my Mental health CBT, i studied for it within two weeks, sat for the exam, and passed. I informed my ward manager of my plans, she was sad. She asked if there is anything she could do for me to stay. I told her my plans are in advance stage. But i informed her that the new employe could contact her for reference. She said she will be happy to write a robust reference.
Then NMC decided to tweak with the online registration platform to make it better, but the new updates on the site do not support persons with an existing pin looking for registration for a second pin. So i could not progress with my registration, I made the new employer aware of this development.
The offer of employment and contract papers were sent to me through the post which i signed and returned.
The next hurdle is the application for a new Visa.

Wow!! Congrats.. Hope the family are all doing fine? its been long we heard from u.. Good to know all is working out well for u
please help us with random pictures.. Thanks boss

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 11:56am On Jun 28, 2020
Richdee1:


Wow!! Congrats.. Hope the family are all doing fine? its been long we heard from u.. Good to know all is working out well for u
please help us with random pictures.. Thanks boss

Thanks my friend, we are fine. I have been busy with work. Work could be physically and mentally exhausting, that i cannot even think talkless of writing/typing. But i will complete the Journal.

2 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 12:09pm On Jun 28, 2020
Party started rolling in, one of the Redhill 5 was about to have her baby, so we organised a baby shower, we taxed ourselves within the cohorts to have some money for gifts and food. We had a nice time connecting, discussing, eating, merry-making and dancing. I got to see friends from other countries dancing to our musics, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Ghanaians. They do love our musics.
I told few friends about my intention to relocate, also my ward manager mentioned it in the ward monthly meeting, one colleague walked up to me and asked, i thought you are happy here ?. I answered, i am happy but i have goals that i cannot achieve here. I am happy but i need to move out of my comfort zone. There are many things to life than just working and chasing money, chasing bank shifts and agency work.

14 Likes

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Arhmiee(f): 11:51pm On Jun 29, 2020
[quote author=Soknown post=91156487
The offer of employment and contract papers were sent to me through the post which i signed and returned.
The next hurdle is the application for a visa

Does one need a new visa every time they change employers? How long are u meant to work with am employer before you can swap to another?

Glad to hear you and your family are well and that you are seeking professional growth over there. All the best
Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:21pm On Jul 03, 2020
Arhmiee:
[quote author=Soknown post=91156487
The offer of employment and contract papers were sent to me through the post which i signed and returned.
The next hurdle is the application for a visa

Does one need a new visa every time they change employers? How long are u meant to work with am employer before you can swap to another?

Glad to hear you and your family are well and that you are seeking professional growth over there. All the best

I wish you well in the next phase.
Yes, you need a new Visa each time you changed your employer as the certificate of sponsorship is attached to your present job until you no longer need sponsorship to stay.
Please post updates when you are through.

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:29pm On Jul 03, 2020
A LITTLE DIGRESSION TO TOUCH ON HISTORY - Looking at the lifes and times of three great black men, in view of 4th of July.

Robert Smalls: The Slave Who Stole a Confederate Warship and Became a Congressman


To save his family—and himself—Robert Smalls had to do something drastic. His bravery made him a folk hero.

It was the spring of 1862, and Robert Smalls—a 23-year-old enslaved man living in Charleston, South Carolina—was desperate to buy the freedom of his wife and children. The asking price was $800.
He had money saved up. Since the age of 12, Smalls had worked odd jobs in Charleston: lamplighter, rigger, waiter, stevedore foreman. At around age 15, he had found work on the city’s docks and joined the crew of the ship CSS Planter. For every $15 he earned, Smalls was allowed to keep $1. The rest of the money went to his owner.
Smalls tried earning extra cash on the side, buying candy and tobacco and reselling it at a higher price. But it was hardly enough. When he asked to buy the freedom of his wife and children, he barely had $100 to his name. He knew, at that rate, the task could take him decades. Smalls had to think of something new—something drastic.

An unwitting bystander might have mistaken Robert Smalls and his wife Hannah Jones for freed slaves. The couple had met when Robert was 16, working at a hotel where Hannah was employed as a maid. They married, had two children, and lived in a private apartment above a horse stable in Charleston. Each day, Robert walked alone to the docks and wharves of Charleston, eventually finding himself work on the CSS Planter.
But appearances of freedom were an illusion. Smalls and Jones had to give nearly all of their income to his owner. Worse yet, the couple was constantly burdened with worry. Smalls knew that his wife and children could be stripped from his life on his owner’s whim. He knew the only way to keep his family together was to buy them.
Born in 1839 behind John McKee’s house, Smalls had grown up as the family’s household favorite (potentially because McKee, or McKee’s son, was his secret father). Whatever the reason, Smalls did relatively limited housework, was allowed inside his owner’s house, and was permitted to play with the local white children.
Smalls’s mother watched her son being coddled and was afraid he’d grow up without knowing about the horrors of slavery, so when Smalls was 10, she dragged her son into the fields. He picked cotton, rice, and tobacco. He slept on dirt floors. He watched slaves in town be tied to a whipping post and lashed. The experience changed him.
Smalls began to rebel. He protested slavery and started appearing more frequently in jail. Eventually, his mother grew concerned for his safety and asked McKee if Smalls could be sent to Charleston to work. Their owner agreed. It was in Charleston that Smalls would discover the woman who became his wife, as well as a talent for sailing.

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:31pm On Jul 03, 2020
Robert Smalls circa 1870-1880. Photo from Mathew Brady, Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.

1 Like

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:33pm On Jul 03, 2020
By the spring of 1862, Smalls was working aboard the CSS Planter, an old cotton steamer-turned-warship. It was the midst of the Civil War, and Smalls helped steer the boat, plant sea mines, and deliver ammunition and supplies to Confederate outposts along the coast. Whenever Smalls looked out toward sea, he saw a blockade of Union ships bobbing on the horizon.
The captain of the CSS Planter, C.J. Relyea—known for wearing a trademark wide-brimmed straw hat—had a crew comprised of multiple slaves. One day, another enslaved crew member grabbed the captain's hat while he was away and planted it on Smalls’s head. “Boy, you look just like the captain,” he said.
Smalls looked out at the ocean, past Fort Sumter and toward the fleet of Union ships in the distance.
He had an idea.

Smalls knew he could steal the Planter. He knew the shipping routes. He knew the checkpoints. He knew the codes and signals to get past the forts. And, of course, he knew how to pilot the boat. As the Planter’s wheelman, Smalls was basically the boat’s unofficial captain.

Late on May 13, 1862, the Planter returned to Charleston from a two-week trip. The white crewmembers were supposed to stay aboard after docking, but the Planter was scheduled to begin another long mission the next morning, and the white crew supposedly missed carousing and sleeping on land. They left the boat for a night out on the town, trusting the enslaved crew would take care of the ship.
It was exactly what Smalls had hoped for.
Around midnight, Robert slipped the skipper’s jacket over his shoulders and ordered the other enslaved crewmembers to light the boilers. At 2 a.m., the CSS Planter eased into Charleston Harbor.
Smalls quietly directed the boat to a rendezvous point where he picked up Hannah, his children, and eight other enslaved people (Smalls had warned his family in advance of the possibility that May 13 could be the fateful night). Hannah later told a reporter that, in his words, “The whole party had solemnly agreed in advance that if pursued, and without hope of escape, the ship would be scuttled and sunk; and … they should all take hands, husband and wife, brother and sister, and jump overboard and perish together.” Her husband was more terse. When she asked what would happen if they were caught, Smalls said, “I shall be shot.”
The crew intended to fight to the death. The boat was loaded with 200 rounds of ammunition and five large guns, including a howitzer and a giant pivot gun. If cornered, they’d dynamite the boiler.
Moonlight glinted off the water. Smalls raised the Confederate and Palmetto flags and pointed the boat at the open ocean. As the Planter approached the first checkpoint, Fort Johnson, Smalls began to pray, “Oh Lord, we entrust ourselves into thy hands.” He sounded a signal on the steam whistle and was waved through. The boat slipped deeper into the harbor.
As the boat approached Fort Sumter, Smalls adjusted the captain’s straw hat and leaned out the pilot-house window. He had watched Captain Relyea pass the fort dozens of times before. He had studied his body language. So Smalls stood on the deck, arms crossed, his face obscured by the hat’s brim and the night’s darkness.
At 4:15 a.m., the Planter sounded the steam whistle again. According to a report filed by the Committee on Naval Affairs, “The signal ... was blown as coolly as if General Ripley [the commander of Charleston’s defense] was on board.”
The guards at Fort Sumter sounded their signal in return: “All right.”
The Planter successfully passed five Confederate gun batteries. Once outside of Fort Sumter’s cannon range, Smalls lowered the rebel flag and raised a white bed sheet. The Planter aimed for the Union blockade.
Seeing a Confederate ship hurtle in their direction, sailors aboard the union USS Onward panicked. It was dusky, and they couldn’t see the surrender flag.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:35pm On Jul 03, 2020
The CSS Planter. Photo from the New York Public Library Digital Collections / Public Domain

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:37pm On Jul 03, 2020
“Open her ports!” Acting Volunteer Lt. J Frederick Nickels ordered. The crew pointed the No. 3 port gun in the direction of the Planter and was ready to fire when somebody aboard cried, “I see something that looks like a white flag!”
The command to fire was dropped. The group aboard the Planter began to dance and sing. As the Planter reached the blockade, Smalls stepped forward and removed his hat. “Good morning, sir!” he yelled. “I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!”
Within minutes, the stars and stripes were flapping high from the Planter’s mast.

Smalls quickly became a folk hero. “If each one of the Generals in our army had displayed as much coolness and courage as [Smalls] did when he saluted the Rebel flag and steamed past the Rebel fort, by this time the Rebellion would have been among the things that were [past],” The New York Daily Tribune wrote. Navy Admiral S.F. Dupont would call Smalls “superior to any who have come into our lines.”

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a $4000 bounty was placed on Smalls’s head and Captain Relyea was court-martialed, sentenced to three months in prison for negligence (although this was later overturned). The Confederate brass was dumbstruck. They couldn’t fathom that a crew of slaves was clever enough to outfox their navy. (Unable to give the credit, F.G. Ravenel, a Confederate Aide-de-Camp, believed that “two white men and a white woman” must have conspired to make it happen.)
Smalls didn’t care. He was too busy enjoying the freedom and money that he had long been denied. A few weeks after surrendering the ship, the U.S. Congress awarded Smalls and his crew half of the Planter’s value. Smalls received $1500 and an audience with President Lincoln.
At one meeting with Lincoln, Smalls was joined by Frederick Douglass. The famed abolitionist implored the president to allow African-Americans to join the military—and convinced him that Smalls should lead the cause.
Smalls did. He joined the U.S. Navy, revealing the location of enemy mines, and personally recruited about 5000 African-American soldiers. He joined the USS Planter on missions to the south, including an attack on Fort Sumter. During a battle at Folly Island Creek, South Carolina, the Planter’s white captain abandoned his post in despair. Smalls stepped into the pilot-house and led the ship to safety. For his bravery, he was awarded the rank of Navy Captain.
When he wasn’t fighting battles at sea, Smalls was fighting civil rights battles on land. In December 1864, Smalls was tossed out of an all-white streetcar in Philadelphia. Enraged, he used his budding fame to protest the segregation of public transit. Three years later, the streetcars of Philadelphia were integrated.
After the war, Smalls returned to South Carolina with the money he earned and bought his former owner's house.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Smalls helped establish a local school board in Beaufort County and one of the first schools for black children in the region. Then he opened a store. In 1868, he ran for—and won—a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives, then two years later in the state Senate. In 1872, he started a newspaper called The Southern Standard. And in 1874, he ran to become a representative in the U.S. Congress.
He won 80 percent of the vote.
During five nonconsecutive terms, Congressman Smalls pushed for legislation to desegregate the military and restaurants in Washington D.C. His work successfully led to the opening of the famous South Carolina marine base at Parris Island.
All that time, Smalls kept his mind and heart open. Legend has it that when his former owner’s wife was stricken with dementia, she’d often wander into his house, believing it was still hers. Rather than send her packing, Smalls invited her inside.
In 1915, Robert Smalls died in the same house. Today, it’s a National Historic Landmark.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:39pm On Jul 03, 2020

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 4:54pm On Jul 03, 2020
Frederick Douglass - United States Minister Resident to Haiti
In office. Circa - 1879

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 8:32pm On Jul 03, 2020
Frederick Douglass, who has been called the greatest American of the nineteenth century, grew up as a slave named Frederick Bailey, and the story of how he named himself in freedom shows how complicated his life, and his world, always was. Frederick’s father, as David W. Blight shows in his extraordinary new biography, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster), was almost certainly white, as Douglass knew early on, and there is something almost cruelly parodic in the grand name the child slave was given: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Escaping to freedom in 1838, at the age of twenty, and needing a new name—in part as a declaration of a reinvented self, in part for the practical necessity of eluding the slave-catchers—he chose to become Frederick Douglass, in honor of a character in a Walter Scott poem. (He added an extra “s” for distinction.)

What’s curious is that this was a completely Southern choice, a tribute to the culture he was escaping. The South, as Mark Twain protested at length, had long been hostage to a cult of Walter Scott’s neo-medievalism, one of the opiates of Southern “gallantry” that justified the concentration-camp culture as a leisurely and gracious one, a myth so durable that it shaped the most successful American movie ever made, “Gone with the Wind.” But the choice is also a reminder that the wind in Romanticism, and in Walter Scott, could blow both ways, toward liberal nationalism and self-renewal as well as toward feudal nostalgia and hierarchy. Douglass’s new name was as much a rejection of his slave name as was Malcolm X’s rejection of his birth name, Little—but in this case the chosen name denoted not an absence but a presence. The name he chose inscribed him within a cultural tradition that he had been forced to inherit and chose to remake. This insistence on seeing past the evils of the Enlightenment in search of the light that was still left there made him one of the most radical readers of the American nineteenth century. No one was ever a more critical reader of the Constitution, or, in the end, a more compelling advocate of its virtues.

With Douglass, then, we have everything and its opposite—the slave wielding a sword of vengeance against the South who adopted the South’s mythology for his own; the militant prophet of the truth that no compromise with slavery was possible who became a central pillar of pragmatic politics in the postwar era. In telling this great story, Blight, a historian at Yale, confronts one great difficulty: Douglass himself wrote his own life three times, each time thrillingly well, though each time with a slightly different purpose. Like the Gospels, each is written with a different ideological agenda. In 1845, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” was written as a straightforward abolitionist horror story, albeit an exceptionally humane and potent one. Ten years later came “My Bondage and My Freedom,” a fuller and more nuanced-novelistic account of the same story. And then, in 1881, when he was in his sixties, he published “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” in which this man, who had watched the ships go by in the Chesapeake Bay with a desperate sense of disbelief that anyone or anything in the world could be so free, was able to report on his journeys to Cairo and Paris and his reception in both as a man of state and of letters.

The prose style in the three memoirs alters under the pressure of the changing agenda: the first time pained and urgent, the second subtler and more considered, the last orotund and outward. Yet, as Blight shows, the tale Douglass wove about himself, from the first to the last volume, is remarkably faithful to what can be dug up independently about the facts of his early life. So Blight’s biography, particularly in its early pages, is necessarily a kind of palimpsest: he dives back and forth beneath Douglass’s texts, sifting and sorting and weaving.

The story, simply told, is that Douglass was largely spared the worst of slavery by inhabiting its more familial edges, at a time when who owned you and where you were owned shaped the course of your life as someone else’s property. After he had been passed from his brutal first master to the man’s kinder son-in-law, Thomas Auld, the transforming event of Douglass’s life was his arrival in Baltimore, at the age of eight, to live with members of Auld’s family. City slaves were better treated than country slaves. “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on a plantation,” Douglass wrote. “He is a desperate slaveholder who will shock the humanity of his non-slaveholding neighbors with the cries of his lacerated slave.” As a child, he had, unusually, been treated more or less as an equal playmate of his first master’s son, and soon Sophia Auld, the wife of Thomas’s brother, began to teach him to read and write.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by rinzylee(m): 2:27am On Jul 04, 2020
Awesome black history you got up there. The power of a determined mind and unified vision is limitless.

AFRICA Arise!!!!!!

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by ecstacy29: 9:46am On Jul 04, 2020
[quote author=Soknown post=87653566]In case you're wondering, what an amala inspired farewell means, it's simply 180° co levitation bi -parallel disposition of the human frame as evidenced by your chest touching the floor.
I know, I know it's too early for this. grin[/quote

I know you are married but permit me to say
I just love you for this! kiss.i mean, I'm just grinning from ear to ear as I can relate with every step of the write up. You are such a gifted writer and you add humor which makes it appealing.
QED!!!

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 1:15pm On Jul 04, 2020
rinzylee:
Awesome black history you got up there. The power of a determined mind and unified vision is limitless.

AFRICA Arise!!!!!!
Thanks my friend. I have been caught on the spirit of Douglass since I read some of his quotes. One thing that is common to them, they are 'lettered men' . 'A lettered man is a better man, for good or evil'.- Soknown 2020.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 1:18pm On Jul 04, 2020
[quote author=ecstacy29 post=91362392][/quote]
Thank you, Welcome on board.
Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 1:52pm On Jul 04, 2020
Absolute power, even when well meant, always becomes arbitrary. Sophia first took immense pleasure at Frederick’s celerity as a pupil, and then, under the pressure of her husband’s disapproval (“If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him”), turned violently against the boy’s education. Frederick persisted, trading bits of bread with street urchins for secret reading lessons. Here, as elsewhere in his life, he defeated the expected racism of his fellows by the sheer magnetism of his manner.

He was also able to take advantage of the oppressor’s hypocrisy: slavery being a Christian institution, it was important to expose the slaves to the Gospels. This meant that the innocent business of studying the Bible could be turned to the subversive aim of acquiring literacy. Having learned to read by literally buying words, Douglass had an intense sense of the power of language, of the double meanings of individual words; irony was ingrained in him. He heard the word “abolition,” for instance, as a mysterious, forbidden incantation; he didn’t know precisely what “abolition” meant, but he could tell from the murmur around it that it mattered enormously.

He loved Baltimore, but was wrenched out of it when he was fifteen and sent a year later to be “broken” in the backwoods by a cruel overseer named Edward Covey. Making up his mind that he would die trying to sustain his manhood, he attacked Covey, with the result, by no means guaranteed, that Covey backed off. Douglass thought this a proof of the powers of resistance, but he also knew that such resistance usually brought instant death or else shipment down to the plantations of the Deep South—a living death. In fact, he was shipped off to the backwoods, where he tried and failed to escape. Then a remarkable piece of good fortune came his way. Auld, for reasons still mysterious—from humanity or guilt or a buried sense of kinship?—meekly took him back to Baltimore and promised to free him after a seven-year hitch. It was, as Douglass came to recognize, the great salvation of his life. In 1848, he wrote an open letter to Auld, saying, “I entertain no malice toward you personally. . . . There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. . . . I am your fellow-man, but not your slave.” That letter was a kind of propaganda piece, to show the slave’s moral superiority to his master, but it was sincere as well as shrewd.

In Baltimore that second, salvaged time, he fell in love with a free black woman, Anna Murray. It is still a little hallucinatory to be reminded that, in the border states, free blacks, second-class citizens but citizens still, lived side by side with those who were property. Murray emboldened Douglass to escape and he fled to freedom disguised as a sailor. The account of his flight north stops one’s heart to read, so near did he come to apprehension. (A worker whom he knew from the docks saw him, recognized him, and—kept silent.)

In 1841, three years after he got a job as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he made a name speaking at the local A.M.E. Zion church, he was brought to an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, a booming whaling port, and made an impromptu speech that changed history. No one had ever heard an ex-slave speak with such precision and eloquence about his experiences. The eminent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his followers pressed him into service as a speaker, and Douglass spent the next fifteen years riding trains from one abolition meeting to the next while Anna, now his wife, who had come north after him, waited in New Bedford and raised an ever-growing crop of children. (They had five in all, including three sons who served in the Civil War, one of them surviving, improbably, the massacre of Robert Gould Shaw’s regiment at Fort Wagner.)

Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 1:57pm On Jul 04, 2020
Like many other young and still unformed activists who discover in themselves a gift for oratory, Douglass had to self-educate even as he was speaking. Young orators’ tongues are formed before their minds are set. This happened to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to inhabit a leadership position that he was not yet fully prepared to assume, as it did to Emma Goldman, an immigrant girl who became Red Emma almost before she mastered English. (In a more benevolent manner, it happened to Barack Obama—one eloquent speech turning him from a relatively green politician into a plausible Presidential candidate.) In each case, the challenge is to keep one’s independence, and one’s head, as others are trying to turn you into their megaphone.

Douglass passed from slave to celebrity in about a year and remained one for the rest of his life. He began the small list of people who are, in effect, the face of their movement. Gloria Steinem was not the most important feminist thinker of her time, or its most significant organizer, but she was the face of American feminism, for a reason. She embodied the reality, confounding to sexists, that a woman who looked like her could be a radical egalitarian about gender. Douglass embodied the reality, confounding to racists, that a black man could be charismatic, imposing, educated, and a voice for absolute emancipation. Douglass’s charisma—along with his good looks—wasn’t incidental. He was one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth century, as photogenic as Jack Kennedy a century later. In the photographic portraits (collected and contextualized in a 2015 volume titled “Picturing Frederick Douglass”), he sometimes looks like a fiercer George Washington—Roman nose, intense scowl of virtue, swept-back classical hair. In a new culture of reproduced images, these things counted.

Douglass’s personal charisma involved, too, an unashamed sexual presence. His slave narratives are strikingly frank about the terrible erotics of slavery, and of black-white race relations, in a way that would not be acceptable in progressive discussions of race until the nineteen-sixties. In his first two memoirs, he writes bluntly about forced sexual relations between slave and master, and what perverse family relations they produced, including the fact that rape was turning the black slave population half white:

If the lineal descendants of Ham are only to be enslaved, according to the scriptures, slavery in this country will soon become an unscriptural institution; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who—like myself—owe their existence to white fathers and, most frequently, to their masters, and masters’ sons. The slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master. The thoughtful know the rest.
His early memoirs find a balance between outrage and subtle irony—those angry, understated phrases: “an unscriptural institution”; “the thoughtful know the rest”—in describing the wrenching effects of slavery on the human soul. Pointing out that one would expect slave masters to be kind to their own children, he coolly analyzes the truth: “Men do not love those who remind them of their sins unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child. What is still worse, perhaps, such a child is a constant offense to the wife. She hates its very presence.” What would be a buried subject in most American writing about black-white relations was with Douglass overt, in a way that must have intimidated his followers and inflamed his haters.

Four relationships—three with white American men, one with a European woman—shaped Douglass’s mature life and mind. He had a tutelary and then an adversarial relation with William Lloyd Garrison; then an admiring and allergic relation with John Brown; next, a prophet-and-politician relation with Abraham Lincoln; and, finally, a deep, romantic relation with a woman named Ottilie Assing. (Throughout this time he made his living, as best he could, as a miscellaneous journalist, beginning an anti-slavery weekly first called, poetically, the North Star and then, tellingly, changed, for branding purposes, to Frederick Douglass’ Paper.)

The story of Douglass’s relationship with Garrison is one of the key stories in American political history. They met and became friends at that 1841 gathering in Nantucket. Garrison, the most famous abolitionist of the period, was the headliner when Douglass was asked to tell the story of his life. Overwhelmed by Douglass’s eloquence, Garrison asked the crowd, “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property or a man?” Douglass went on the road as a Garrisonite.

Less than a decade later, they broke, bitterly and for life. Some of the bitterness arose from Douglass’s uneasy sense that he was not so much being used as being put on display. One wonders if Ralph Ellison was aware of Douglass’s relationship with Garrison when, in “Invisible Man,” he wrote about his unnamed narrator’s relationship with “the Brotherhood,” a version of the Communist Party. They’re strangely similar: the black man discovers a gift for oratory, is instantly pressed into propaganda service by a white radical organization, and has a deeply ambivalent relation with his new white friends, who are just a little too much like his old white masters.

Douglass most forcefully offered this insistence in his 1852 “Fourth of July” speech in Rochester. It is a masterpiece of startling argumentative twists. He begins with unstinting praise of the values and character of the Founding Fathers—the only forewarning of dissent being his speaking of the events of the seventeen-seventies in the second person: your Founders did this . . . your history says that. Then he makes his thundering turn: “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.” Finally, he makes a still more surprising swerve, back toward the American center: the Constitution is solid, all that needs fixing is our way of reading it. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

The constitutional issue was, and remains, epic. All of American liberalism remains at stake in this choice—it is what divides Obama from Cornel West and his other critics on the left. For Garrison, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to abandon it. For Douglass, the failure of liberal constitutionalism to achieve its stated aim was a reason to re-state the aim more forcefully and more inclusively. If the aim was in the document, the arc could yet be completed. He thought the aim was there, and the arc was possible.

The philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams, an astute reader of Douglass, sees him as drawn to the “possibility of refounding the Union on the basis of a reconstituted practice of citizenship.” Douglass’s belief in the integrity of the American Constitution made him, ironically, less willing to wait for legislative remedies and readier to use violence against the slave establishment. This became Lincoln’s reasoning, too, evident in his legendary speech at Cooper Union, in 1860: the historical evidence showed that the signers of the Constitution considered slavery a national question, up for national debate. It wasn’t a local or a states’-rights question. Wrongly decided once, it was still on the agenda of the nation as a whole. In the name of the Constitution, slavery was to be assaulted frontally. (How frontally Lincoln could not decide, until events overtook him as President.) For Douglass, this urge to fight for principle, while making sure that the fight could be won, shaped his strange push-and-pull relationship with John Brown, in itself a mini American epic.

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 2:06pm On Jul 04, 2020
During the war years, he spent a surprising amount of intellectual energy opposing what now seems to us an obvious chimera—a plan to resettle ex-slaves outside the United States, in Central America or the West Indies or Africa. Though Lincoln sometimes seemed sympathetic to this idea, “colonization” was always unrealistic. But it wasn’t inherently a racist scheme, and not a few black leaders, including the great abolitionist Martin R. Delany, advocated what was, in effect, a form of black Zionism. Why, then, did Douglass think it so important to battle? It was because Douglass saw culture and civilization almost entirely in what we now call Eurocentric terms. He took his language and his lore and his moral categories from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. He did not see these as the alien property of white people. He thought they were his, to own and to alter.
Douglass’s relationship with Lincoln throughout the war has been beautifully detailed in “Giants” (2008), another book by John Stauffer, and Blight largely follows the same outlines of the dance between crusader and politician. Douglass was at first impatient and mistrustful of Lincoln, became somewhat more empathetic concerning his political struggles, and ended being a full-hearted admirer, enthralled by the intended scope of emancipation. Lincoln, for his part, came to understand that Douglass’s moral vision was impeccably correct—and a critical undergirding for Lincoln’s increasingly militant views. At the second Inauguration, Lincoln greeted Douglass at the White House reception not as “Mr. Douglass” but as “my friend.”
Douglass’s relationship with Lincoln throughout the war has been beautifully detailed in “Giants” (2008), another book by John Stauffer, and Blight largely follows the same outlines of the dance between crusader and politician. Douglass was at first impatient and mistrustful of Lincoln, became somewhat more empathetic concerning his political struggles, and ended being a full-hearted admirer, enthralled by the intended scope of emancipation. Lincoln, for his part, came to understand that Douglass’s moral vision was impeccably correct—and a critical undergirding for Lincoln’s increasingly militant views. At the second Inauguration, Lincoln greeted Douglass at the White House reception not as “Mr. Douglass” but as “my friend.”

In the end, Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions of the black experience in America. A case can be made for him as the progenitor of the pragmatic-progressive strain that leads to Dr. King and, even more, to Bayard Rustin and Obama—disabused of illusions, but insistent that with time the Constitution can be realized in its fullness and that democratic politics are the way to do it. This Douglass is the friend of Lincoln, the man who sustained the necessary relations with institutional power—as Dr. King would do, however guardedly, with Kennedy and then with Johnson. Douglass understood that African-Americans were too small a minority to act without allies. A related pragmatism, prominent in his later writings, became the model of “self-reliance” of the kind that inspires one conservative strain of African-American thought, from Booker T. Washington to Clarence Thomas.

Yet Douglass can also be seen as the father of the most militant strain of resistance, the kind that insists on the uncompromising rejection of racism, with violence as a recourse when necessary. His confrontation with the brutal slave-breaker Covey is still a model of “manhood,” of self-assertion in defiance of death. Lincoln remains the saint of American democracy, yet his ascent from the backwoods to the White House was, for all its rigors, a far easier ride. Lincoln read in the midst of farming chores; Douglass learned to read at the risk of his life. He had farther to go, and went wider in getting there. Such are the multitudes he contains; he is far from a nineteenth-century figure alone. In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/the-prophetic-pragmatism-of-frederick-douglass

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 2:32pm On Jul 04, 2020
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. - -Frederick Douglass

I remember this one was written on the chalkboard in my Grammar school's library. - “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass


This one is heavy, when you need fire-crackers during protests - “It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass


“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Frederick Douglass

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Re: The Odyssey. Narrative Of A Nigerian Nurse. (PROPRIETARY CONTENT) by Soknown: 2:37pm On Jul 04, 2020
Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

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