As this popular Chinese saying goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, meaning even the longest and most difficult ventures have a starting point: something which begins with one first step; or in other words, big achievements are made through small but concrete resolves.
Reading has long been my passion. Writing too. Well, with time and my increasing social and professional responsibilities, these passions have now gradually and literally faded out, so to say.
But in those days, they were strong enough to lead me to engaging in so many things like reading such books as “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” of former US President Barack Obama and “A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier” of Ishmael Beah, a former Sierra Leonean child soldier each in the blink of an eye and also embarking on an exciting adventure: blogging!
Back in 2011, in the heydays of the military and political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire, i created my first blog on a platform “Solidaire du Monde” promoted by the French Agency for Development (AFD). This blog does not exist anymore as the platform was closed. With my first blog, I started my first articles narrating my daily routines, the challenges my family and I were going through during ongoing crisis. As then a grassroot blogger driven by the only desire to improve my skills, I searched and met other well-profiled bloggers such as David Kpelly from Togo, Florian Nguimbis from Cameroon, Alimou Sow from Guinea from whom I learned quite a lot in terms of writing style. From them, I heard of the a community of bloggers called “Mondoblog” promoted by ‘Radio France Internationale’ (RFI) selecting top francophone bloggers yearly from across the world. I submitted an article for their 2012 competition and was selected as one of the 100 top bloggers for the year and was awarded different gadgets followed with a week-long fully funded training in Blogging, and citizen journalism in Senegal in 2013. My second blog still accessible here which has no particular focus gave me the opportunity to tackle issues of interest to me and reach out to a larger audience. I am now a blogger, I could boldly say! From then, I started getting somehow known with an increase of my readership.
However, writing in French has proven to be restrictive, to some extent, as a large majority of my friends who speak English could not read me. The idea of creating my third blog, in English subsequently came up four years ago. Though this third blog was created long ago, I have been slow in producing content and that is where I was heading to alluding to the chinese saying above. It is a perilous endeavor for a francophone to write in English and make sense. One of the reasons is that for my years of blogging, I came to realize that the beauty of writing lies in the turns of phrases used, choice of particular wording to allude to something and use of figures of speech to express ideas. You lose all of these as a non native speaker and are restricted to using very basic language that sometime a native anglophone will easily feel bored with reading even the first paragraph of your article, as you might feel now. Another reason being that you always have to keep google translate sentences losing the track of your ideas, not to mention other mistakes you might make unknowingly.
What I mean in nutshell is that, there are clear risks not to be able insightful enough to tickle the reading appetite of your visitors and create/maintain a community of readers. What does it mean to crack your head and write for people who do not read you!? Nothing! Yet, the step is worth taking. This is thus a long and tedious journey I am finally and happily embarking on. I am putting this as disclaimer to ask for your indulgence as you navigate through the articles of this blog. Keep somewhere at the back of your mind that you are reading a French speaker who tries his way in English .
On this blog, you will read articles on topical issues raking from governance, economics, development and cooperation, climate change, gender etc; I will share articles on my professional experience and also on situation I come across on a daily basis. My writing tone will be sometime serious, harsh or funny or a bit of each. After all, isn’t that what life is all about!?
I cherish diversity. I believe that great ideas always come from great interaction with people from all walks of life. So, this blog is also a platform to exchange and share perspectives and equally grow an online community. I will try to make your time on this blog worth spending. Or it could be the other way round. So, I look forward to engaging with you reading your feedback and contribution/suggestion on what are relevant to you as you flip through the pages of the blog.
In fact, if you have read this introductory article to the end, you might already have an interest and a reason to come back again. Subscribe therefore to my Newsletter and stay tuned when my next articles are published. I am sure that one of them will be of great interest to you and maybe to your friends; So, don’t keep them away. Spread the word. Share the blog with them pretending that this is the best blog ever you have come across in your whole life .
Welcome to my world!