Summary of JAMB Sweet sixteen (Chapter 3-4).

How about you read Summary of JAMB Sweet Sixteen (Chapter 1-2) before going ahead

Chapter Three: Work.

It started with Aliya (on break) deciding to be a lawyer and no more a medical doctor after serving him tea which she had previously struggled to make rightly (the decision was not influenced by her struggles in chemistry, arts and humanities just seemed to be her calling. She even made an A in Chemistry that term). Thereafter, her father commended her hard work, saying that she must have learned more from the struggle, quoting a line in the Ulysses (a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, an Englishman, the one which became the motto for the 2012 summer Olympics in London: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Mr.Bello told his daughter it was better to fail than to cheat when she told him about her classmate who had cheated in Physics examination because she would fall into trouble with her parents if she failed, and that she was always compared with her sister. Sogo, her classmate whose father was a lawyer had been prompted to be one as well though he didn’t want it leading to the talk on Kahlil Gibran’s poem on Your Children in the book, Prophet. In it, Aliya’s dad had learned that parents were conduits to their children’s lives, but not the mastermind so parents were to listen to their children because young ones looked ahead with hope while old ones looked behind with regrets. Aliya noticed that her father’s wisdom was from the books he read, but he feared that her generation would not read and that technology would make a generation of idiots (Albert Einstein). Tech was not bad, people only misused it. Aliya found herself getting interested in the Prophet with her father noting that it was better than Twilight albeit one didn’t have to read serious stuff all the time.

Chapter Four: The Gandhi Test.

The five bedrooms and three living rooms in their house proved to Aliya that her parents probably wanted more than her as a child. Also, Mr.Bello had a mahogany cabinet that housed the souvenirs he got from every country he visited. He called it his museum of mementos.

Aliya and her mum made it a point of duty to add to it. A soft camel with a jingle bell from Dubai and decorated plates from China respectively.

Aliya’s parents were said to have had different backgrounds; her mother had been middle class while he had been from a lower class. She had gotten her nursing degree from a uni in the UK while he had gotten his from a Nigerian university. They had met when he was writing a story on road accident victims as a cub reporter, and she had been an A&E nurse. He had had only a pair of jeans and two shirts.

In the 16-page letter, Aliya had been told to apply the Gandhi test if in doubt of right and wrong. Mahatma Gandhi was the one who fought for his country to gain independence from Great Britain. He abstained from political power but was a leader (Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indira Gandhi was India’s first Prime Minister after independence). He also lived a poor life to prove that humans didn’t need much for survival.

Gandhi test: you can tell that what you are doing is good or bad if you want other people to know about it or not. Mr.Bello pitched those who had no shame of covering their bad deeds as animals, having no morals and ethics. Ethics were founded on moral principles. Ethics were the general guidelines that varied from place to place, individual to individual but still grounded in the fundamental notion of bad and good.