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I grew up in the rural settings and there were some basic requirements & responsibilities that a child of 6-12years must possesses and perform in order not be classified as a lazy child and they are what our parents used to measure growth as of then.
The most commonest one was riding of bicycle. It's seen that a child must be acquainted with bicycle before he reaches 10 years of age. To a good extent, the bicycle riding isn't just for fun but it'll be of good help in making some errands easier especially when it comes to going of farm and fetching of water.
When I was around 6years, I wasn't ready to learn how to ride a bicycle because there's a stigmatic believe on it, which has it that an injury must be sustained by the child before he or she would master fully the act of riding.
I believed on this so much because I had seen a lot of people that got the said injury, so I became sluggish in my attempt to learn how to ride because I wasn't ready to sustain any injury on my soft body.
Although I always see myself as being lazy whenever I see my mates are riding bicycle with easy, some use it to do racing but there I was, I can't even do any.
It was when I began to receive mockery words from friends and siblings that I decided to sacrificially venture into learning how to ride. My mind was made up to get the "sacrificial" injury because the mockery was just too much.
We had three bicycles at home, they were local bicycles and not the modern type of bicycles. So I picked one and called for some of my older cousins to be my coach.
Two of them volunteered to coach me and we kicked off the learning process. I found it difficult to catch up quickly because I was being careful in order not to have the unavoidable injury.
Yeah, within two weeks, I got it mastered and I joined my colleagues in racing.
The shocking part was that I didn't sustained any injury, so I don't know where they cooked up the believe on the compulsory injury from.
My parents were so proud of me because to them, I've grown. I became very fast in running some errands, fetching of water from river with a small handy gallon was increased to a big gallon due to my capability to use a bicycle.
Some days, I made use of bicycle to go to school because it was faster and trekking looked like a "suffer head".
I got my dad relieved from carrying me on his bicycle whenever we are going to farm, I compete with him on the road with my bicycle.