Personal Essay

In this essay I am going to let you into my life with one intention to shed light on who is Micheel Nyathi. My journey will follow various routes which I have tried to package into events. I will start by telling you a bit about my background and the environment I was born. I will also touch on my life after school. I will shift to my working experiences, and then go into my learning experiences. I will move into my university experience as introduced to me by the University of Free State. I will talk about my dreams from there I will share with you my plans in as far as education is concerned. I have learnt a few things that I did not know about myself during the introduction to the BML course. I will also discuss things I did not know anything about before I visited the university, for instance I will talk about my personality and my learning style as revealed by what I learnt in the contact session. I would like to talk about people that have influenced me in my life.

I was born in a small township called Alexandra. It is situated north of Johannesburg. It is quite small and one does not need to be a rocket scientist to see that, it has too many people living in it than it can stomach. The streets are very small and there is a shack on every corner, sewage smell hangs in the air as these sewage systems do burst occasionally and it takes time for the municipality to attend to them, life goes on nevertheless. I have learnt that external influences can impact one's life in a positive or negative way; I learnt this is in my own back yard. In the past Alexandra was caught up in riots that destabilized the educational system, so many of us had to drop out of schools. I came from polygamist family were my father could not cope with supporting his big family, my situation was complicated by these incidences of violence, as a result I had to leave school.

Life after school was not a bed of roses form. Leaving school resulted in me being found in the company of wrong elements. It did not take long to find myself arrested for a stealing. I did not go into the prison system though, but I learnt a valuable lesson that was to find a job and try and do something about my educational problem, I figured out that education would liberate me from the grips of illiteracy.

Getting a job was a problem. It was made complex by the fact that I had gone to school only as far as standard six. The requirements of the work environment dictated that I must have a standard ten to get a job of some kind. By luck I was employed by a company called Alert Industrial as a security guard, this became my lucky break. I was sent to provider security for employees of a small company called Teljoy. They had joined Vodacom as business partners in the cell phone industry. Teljoy opened a small call centre led by a gentleman called Jorge Mendes. Working for this company fascinated