By Sunday Ani
A retired nurse, Mrs. Patricia Uche Temofeh, has decried the rate at which marriages crash these days, attributing the major cause to impatience on the part of women. A native of Onicha-Olona, Aniocha Local Government Area of Delta State, she noted that women of yesteryears had more successful marriages than the present generation of women.
In this interview with the Daily Sun, Mrs. Temofeh who recently celebrated her 77th birthday spoke in variety of issues including the secret of living long and healthy, life at retirement, a look at what the health sector was and what it is now among others.
You just celebrated your 77th birthday with an open thanksgiving, how has the journey been so far?
Well, it has been quite interesting. I say so because in a way, we appear to be the middle generation between the very old times and what is happening today. The children of the late 1940s and the children of today are very different. Their behaviour and morals are quite different. There were so many things that were tolerated in our own time, but today, I can tell you that there are no rooms for such things. For instance, there were certain things women couldn’t do then but they can do all those today. At that time, a woman couldn’t contribute to any family discussion but today, it is different. Their manner of dressing then was equally very different. The things we tolerated in marriage then cannot be tolerated today, and that is why marriages are crashing. At that time, patience was the watchword. Today, women no longer give any chance to the men, everybody claims equality now.
You retired as a nurse, compare the health sector you worked in and what we have today?
In fact, our own time was the best time because everybody worked conscientiously. Even in training, there was no room to do what you liked; everything was according to the rules, but today, it is not the same. At that time, when we graduated, most of us were better than newly qualified doctors because towards the end of the course, we took full charge of the wards without anybody giving us direction on what to do and what not to do.
After we graduated from the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), I wanted to spend sometimes to help the nurses there because the work was quite heavy, but incidentally, when I went with my friends to the Federal Ministry of Health to register as a nurse, we didn’t know that the woman there had another thing in mind for us. She was aiming to fix us in some areas. So, she just told us to wait so that they could prepare our registration cards. We waited and behold, they brought it alongside our appointment letters. I was sent to the Massey Children’s Hospital on Lagos Island. They had in-patients and out-patients. One of my friends was sent to the General Hospital, while the other one was sent to the Island Maternity Hospital. The interview was done by the late Animashaun, who was the head of department at that time. My first day at work, I was to resume by 7am but when I came I was to take care of two wards comprising 30 children each, making up 60 children in all. And I managed the two wards, D and F wards, all alone. That was how I started to manage two wards at a time with no other nurse to assist. But the good thing was that I had been trained in such a manner that I could withstand any situation. As soon as I was through with the patients in one ward, I switched over to the other. I didn’t find it difficult.
Secondly, at that time, once you finished, you could register with England and Wales because our training programme was the same thing with theirs over there but today, things have changed. I got jobs in two places in the UK, St Mary’s Hospital, Leeds, and one other hospital in Central London, but I couldn’t go. Today, all eyes are on the nursing school. Senators, House of Reps members and other big politicians are all fighting to get their people in the nursing schools; so when you go there, you have limited spaces for commoners like us.
And then, doctors didn’t go on strike that time. We had very committed doctors like the late Professor Ransome Kuti. I worked with him for a long time in the children’s department in LUTH. He was a very nice man.
How is life after retirement?
I can say it is quite interesting. You have a choice; either to continue with what you have been doing or to veer out. In my own case, I veered out. I tried to go into family planning services and a little of the other parts of medicine but I saw that our people are not quite ready for that because most of the time, they won’t allow you to help them make a choice. They have their mind on a particular family planning type they wanted and that one might not be good for them. The way I was trained is that you have to interview your patient to find out the person’s medical history and help the person to determine which method is best for her. But some of them would insist on their own choice and with that, I was not very comfortable because I wouldn’t like to treat a person, and she starts having complications. It would look as if I didn’t know what I was doing.
But, since medicine is not something one can do throughout one’s life because it is very much demanding, I veered off into marking, which I do at my own time.
When some people remember that they would one day retire from their job, they become afraid, what advice do you have for such people?
There is no need to be afraid of retirement, because if you planned yourself very well, you shouldn’t have any problems. Right from the day you started your job, you should know that everything that has a beginning has an end. Some organisations will even prepare their staff for retirement. In the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, where I worked, we were trained on how to survive after retirement.
Do you think marriages were more successful in your own time than now?
Of course, there were more successful marriages that time than what we have today. The women then were very patient and very much interested in making their home succeed. They trained their children in the right way. But today, every woman wants to work, leaving the home front for the house-helps, whose backgrounds, most often, are not known, thereby endangering the safety of the children. That time, women were always at home with the children and when she they were not at home, close relations would be there for the children.
What advice do you have for the women of today?
I would advise the women of today to spend time with their children. They should wait until they are grown to some level, maybe after they have started school, before they can go and work. They should be at home to look after their children personally. They could have house-helps, but that does not mean they should leave their children’s upbringing entirely for the house-helps. By the time the children grow up and start going to school, they could engage in any productive venture of their choice. Today’s women are luckier than us when it comes to engaging in something productive because they belong to the internet age. Even within the period when they are at home taking care of their children, they could deploy social media to do one business or the other; they don’t need to be in the market to do business today. There are so many things they can do sitting at home and earn money for the family. So, they can work from home. They have a very big advantage compared to us. And then, they should have good morals; they should respect their husbands no matter the condition. They should try as much as possible to make their marriages work.
What does it take to be a mother?
To be a mother, you have to be raised. Whatever religion you practice, whether it is Christianity or Islam or even traditional religion, there are certain basic things in life that you must know and preserve; that is your responsibility as a woman. God has created man and woman in marriage and each of them has his/her own responsibility, even though they call the man the head and the woman the helper, but the two should have full understanding of each other and there should be good communication between them because if there is a problem, you must communicate and discuss how to solve that problem. So, you must be mature for marriage. Those things you do as a single lady must be done away with once you are married as a woman. There should be unity and cooperation and love between the two. The morality must be there so that you can train your children in the proper way.
There are a lot of social evils by children, ranging from cultism to armed robbery, kidnapping and internet fraud among others. Should we say that mothers have failed in their responsibility of bringing up these children with the right values?
It is not just mothers, but both parents. In cultism for instance, you have both males and females but there are more males there; the same thing applies to kidnapping, armed robbery and internet fraud. But these crimes were not there in this frequency. At the time I finished my training and was courting my husband, we usually stayed late at the Bar beach and there was no problem. The environment was safe.
At 77, you are still very strong and healthy; what are the secrets of long life?
First and foremost, you must be close to God. You must realize that there is a being that created you; be grateful to Him. Obey all the commandments of God and do all that God wants you to do because you know that having been born into the world, one day, all of us will go back to the creator. Even though nobody knows when, where and how, the only certain thing is that death will come when it will come. So, we are closer to where we are going than where we are coming from. So, you must be closer to God and try to advise and lead people in a Godly way.
Secondly, your relationship with people, including your family and neighbours must be very cordial because your neighbours are your first next of kin. If you are sick for instance, it is your neighbours that will come to help you first before your relatives who live very far away from you come to help. So, your relationship and friendship with others is very vital.
Again, your food is very important. There are certain things you will eat at a certain age and it will discomfort you; stop eating such foods. There is always a substitute for such foods.
What are the things you enjoyed doing as a young woman that you still enjoy doing today?
I like talking to people because man is a social being. You must interact with people; you can’t just stay alone. That is very boring and it is not in our culture. I find out that your situation worsens if you don’t come out to interact and socialize with people, because the few times I travelled to the UK, it affected them very adversely. Somebody will die in an apartment and nobody will know. Mails will come and there will be no reply. Neighbours will just be going in and out because there, everybody minds their own business. Nobody bothers about the other person, unlike our own way of living here, where if anything happens to you, your neighbour will be the first to know. Over there, because of their weather, like winter which is like our mortuary, somebody can die and remain unnoticed for one year and the body will not smell because it will dry up. So, over the next one year, that dead body can be there, such a thing cannot happen here.
How do you relax?
I like gardening. I like socializing. I like to talk to my neighbours; we discuss a lot. It relieves me a lot. I like going to church to pray. I also do some exercises like walking some distances.