Thank you so much Kelvin Sulugwe for this opportunity, where we have to share our real time stories to your wide, reasoning audience made up of people who are striving for motivating content on social media.

I may not be a good writer as you are, but I believe you will help edit this article, I just want to tell my story.

My name is Cornelius Fombe from Fatima, Nsanje, but I currently stay in Zomba where I settled with my wife to whom I have been married for 7 solid years now and together we have 2 girls, Chimwemwe and Stella.

I graduated from MCA where I studied Accounting and I was very lucky to get a job at one of the NGOs as soon as finished my Advanced Diploma and it was a very good job which introduced me to a good life.

Everything was very good then and I had one of the best time. I did everything a person with money can do and I also got married to my wife, but unfortunately, when our first girl was born, I lost my job due to somethings which happened at work and I ended up being arrested and spending so much to fight for my freedom. There was a mistake which happened in the accounting department and since I was the head, it was attributed to me. I failed to prove my innocence and the organization was also a bit lenient to me that I was simply fined to pay back the money which was lost. It was about K11 million kwacha.

To some people, this might seem a small amount but it really affected my finances. I ended up selling my car, my wife’s car and uncompleted house which I had started building in order to raise money to pay the organization. This completely put me on a zero and I once again found myself searching for a job, but with no success.

Things got bad. We kept moving from one house to another, while downgrading levels to get what we could afford at that particular time. We literally sold everything just to survive and we depended largely on my wife who works as a bank teller. She had to support our family, her poor family and from time to time, my family too. I always saw the stress on her face, but she always tried to smile and told me it was fine.

I don’t know how one has to wait until things become better again, but with me, it kept getting once that I started having depression and sometimes, anxiety attacks. I felt lonely and afraid of the future. I had suicidal thoughts and sometimes I just become an angry person. My own thoughts scared me. I felt useless.

Then it come a time that my wife had a chance to get a loan from her office. She told me she wanted to get it and give it to me to start a business. Honestly, I was never a person to stand like that on my own with business. I was more focused on getting a job myself and be paid at the end of the month. The idea of running a business scared me. What if, just what if things dint work out?

Through reading different motivations, I finally gathered courage and asked her to go ahead. I started pork farming and started very slow. I read so much about the business and from time to time, asked my friends from Bunda College who helped me with the information I needed. My wife really supported me and made me feel like rearing pigs was the best thing of my life. She could call me names like “a Piggy” or “a Nkhumba” and whatever she would come up with just to cheer me out and to be honest, it helped. I regained my self-esteem, went around Zomba marketing my pigs and started getting good orders.

Things took a different turn when I won a deal to be supplying a large number of pigs to a shop in Blantyre. My own production could not sustain it, so while I worked hard on expanding my own, I also bought from other farmers and to be fair, life is good. We repaid the loan, built a better house than the one we wanted to build before and have nicer cars than those we had at first.

I have become a better man than I was before and I do not take life lightly. I am grateful to my wife and those who stood with me, even those who bailed out on me have found themselves in my life again and I can only forgive. If I never had a wife that I have now, I don’t know where I would have been, if I would still be alive. To women out there, a man can fall anytime. I emotionally abused my wife the first time I had money. I had a number of side chicks and all, but when things became bad, she did not judge me on what I did to her, but still found hope in what I could be. I made a promise to only be with her and together, we have turned our house into a home.

To my fellow men, getting employed is the sweetest thing because it offers guaranteed financial shelter, but also try to explore other investments when you can. When you work for a company, anything can happen, whether you actually do the wrong thing or not, so it’s good to try other things when employment fails or better still, when you are still employed.

This is my story. How It Started.

Cornelius Fombe, a Piggy for a Biggy.

Views in this article are not of Kelvin Sulugwe, but the sender whose name appears at the end of the story. If you have a story of How It Started for you and want to share with readers, you can send it to me through “Submit Article”. It should be a story which can motivate other people and give them lessons of life. You can write in either English or Chichewa, I will take time to edit your submission to suit our standards. It can be on any topic, as long as it as a personal experience worth sharing.