FAMILY VALUES With The Nwaiwu's

FAMILY VALUES
Our feature family presentation on “family values” sounds more of a fairy tale than what obtains in the real world but I tell you what? It’s real, real and nothing but REAL.
In recent times, families have lost its essence and the once placed values on families are lost and replaced with incessant “Separations, Divorces, Adultery, Hate, Rivalry and other social vices”.
In the days of our forefathers, families (even the very polygamous ones) were bound in love, unity, respect for wife, husband, elders and siblings. The reverse seems to be the order of the day in today’s marriages and homes. Wives blame husbands while husbands blame wives for decadence in family values. Who really takes the blame?

WHAT ARE FAMILY VALUES?
Family Values are the primary tenets on which families are founded, raised and appreciated. They are those things that make families worthwhile. These include: Integrity, Trust, Love, Understanding, Respect for self & others, Faithfulness, Truthfulness, Humility and above all, the fear of God.
A perfect example of a family with its values intact is one in which the husband of the house lays perfect solid foundation by first loving his wife, provides for his family, raises his children in the fear of God, upholds the belief of “FAMILY FIRST”. He not only spends quality time with his family, but teaches them also, the importance of mutual respect, understanding, peace and love in the development and advancement of family.

WHERE DID TODAY’S FAMILIES GET IT WRONG?
Most today’s families got it all wrong by making wrong choice life partners. Many today’s marriages were built on lies, materialism, fame and selfish gains. With due respect to the ladies, most of them refused to look beyond the ordinary when it comes to marriage. They are easily attracted to material things and as such, turn blind eyes to the man behind the wealth. When reality sets in, only then will they realize the man they got married to lack in almost everything a marriage needs to work. Same thing applies to men who focus all their attention on ladies’ beauty and physical appearance more than the inner qualities required for sustainability in marriages.

It is horrifying to note that most young married couples engage in extra marital affairs owing to the reasons given above. Most embarrassing is the fact that most of our young married men see nothing wrong in this. With due respect to our men, they are the most guilty of committing adultery. What fun is there outside that can’t be created within your household? I need answers from the men please. The women are not exonerated as some have been caught in the act as well.

WHAT IS THE REMEDY?
All hope is not lost as there is good news to us. Abia Post found out that there are still exceptional men out there bent on upholding family values against all odds. This family’s story can only be compared to those found in Fairy Tales’ but right here in our midst is a PERFECT FAMILY WITH ITS FAMILY VALUES INTACT.
Dear Readers, we present to you, THE NWAIWUs:



AP (Abia Post): May we get to know you sir:
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: My name is Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu
AP : And your wife?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: Mrs. Ifeyinwa Hadasha Nwaiwu
AP: How and When did you meet your wife?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiuwu: (Laughs and thinks), At a friend's wedding in Terminus Hotel, Aba on August 14th, 1994 to be precise. She was the bride's chief.
AP: What attracted her to you?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: Her colour and calm nature. It was so real and original.
AP: How did you approach her?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I suggested to take a photograph with her and the brother who happens to be someone i know. They agreed and we took a photograph, a copy I kept and cherished. After the wedding, I never got to see or hear from her again till four years later when she came for her baptism in my church. It was then I got to know she was based in Awka, where she attended the wedding from. Her presence in my church for her baptism rekindled my interest in her.I didn't take any further chance in getting to know her properly and before we knew it, we became husband and wife.
AP: When did you get married?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: 24th October, 1998.
AP: Is your marriage blessed with child/children?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: (Laughs)Ofcourse, they are the ones you are seeing now. Four boys and one girl. The girl, Nancy, is the first and marked her birthday today, 17/6/2012. Duke is next to her, 11years. Justice is the third and 9years. Shallom follows after Justice and is seven years. The baby of the house, Eva is 5years old.
AP: What is responsible for your youthful look?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: My wife, she is fitness crazy so i keep in shape for her. She also makes sure I eat rightly by cooking and providing the right meals.
AP: What is your normal day like?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I leave the house mondays-saturdays by 8:30am & return 6pm.
AP: What is your relationship with your children like?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: Intimate. I am very close to each of them.
AP: Do you have any favorite child?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: No. I will discourage parents from having a favorite child because it breeds and encourages envy from the lesser loved children towards the favorite one and this is not good for the unity and peace of the family.
AP: What has been your biggest marital challenge?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I don't really have marital challenges per se. The only initial challenge I had was infusing the two families together.
AP: What has kept your family united?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I must say it's the fear of God, Prayers, support and understanding from both families.
AP: Most women complain of infidelity from their husbands, what do you say to this?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I am of the view that marriage is sacred and should be kept so. I do not subscribe to extra marital affairs and advice men in such habit to desist and respect the tenets of marriage as the bible instructs.
AP: Are you saying you are not party to this allegation?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I am married to my wife and shares my bed with none other.
AP: What advice do you have for both young and old married couples?
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: I want couple to understand that there is no spefic formular for marriage and as such, should stop trying to be like the next door neighbour. Let them be themselves, understand each other's strengths and weaknesses, support each other, create fun within the house and above all, invite God to be the ultimate head of the family. Once there is mutual understanding and respect, everything naturally falls into place.
AP: It's been a pleasure being with your wonderful family. Thanks for your time.
Emmanuel Ekene Nwaiwu: You are welcomed anyday. Thank you and God bless.































Mr. Emmanuel Nwaiwu is an astute businessman with a humble beginning who through hardwork and committment has grown his business to International Standard. He deals on all types of High Class Laces.

WELCOME TO OHAFIA

WELCOME TO OHAFIA
Ohafia is a town and local government area in Abia State, Nigeria. It is an Igbo speaking region. The ancestral capital of Ohafia is the centrally located village of Elu. The Ohafia Local Government Area also includes the towns of Abiriba and Nkporo.
The ancestors of the Ohafia people were renowned as mighty warriors. This aspect of the Ohafia peoples history remains fundamental to the Ohafia people's sense of identity. The warrior's cap or "leopard cap" (Igbo: Okpu agu) is well known and is an associated product of Ohafia. The Ohafia warrior tradition is embodied in the performance of Iri agha.
Ohafia is home to the third largest military base in Nigeria, named Goodluck Jonathan Barracks. It houses the headquarters of the newly established 14 Brigade and 145 Battalion office Complex.

RITES OF PASSAGE IN OHAFIA

John C. McCall
Department of Anthropology
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

Children begin to acquire knowledge of their ancestral ties to Ohafia when they accompany and assist their parents in work and social interaction. They travel to the farm, to market and to the compounds of friends and relatives. They are sent running on errands to deliver yams, to fetch water, to bid a neighbour visit, to perform countless tasks assisting in the progress of daily life and sociality. Through this participation in quotidian existence they gain an emerging sense of the cultural environment. They discover the names of places and in doing so learn that residential compounds are known by reference to the men who originally cleared the bush and established the site as cultural space. They learn that access to the constantly shifting mosaic of agricultural plots which demand their labor and yield their food is reckoned by reference to the names of ancestral mothers who farmed those plots ages ago.

This sense of inhabited and embodied history which informs the ancestral presence is not a formal abstraction transmitted by didactic procedures. It is a lived reality which develops over time through everyday experience. As the child navigates this terrain, tending to the small responsibilities assigned to him or her, this landscape of names begins to take shape: the names of the dead, of those people who cleared the land, built the compounds, farmed the land and conceived the people. It is impossible to identify a particular place in the village without making reference to these names. They are simultaneously its history and its topography.

Residence in Ohafia is patrilocal and compounds are composed of large houses, occupied by senior males surrounded by lines of smaller huts housing other family members. Typically, men's huts line one side of a path while women's huts line the other. The overall pattern is one of compact rows of contiguous structures traversed by a maze of paths. Amidst this labyrinth of domestic space are numerous shrines, some hidden, some out in the open. One type, marked by a thin oko tree (Pterocarpus soyauxic) surrounded by stones is found in a small clearing near the patriarch's house. The tree marks the shrine as ezi ra ali, the place where mothers of that compound bring their newborn children to be blessed. The rite is a simple one performed by the eldest daughter of the paternal group. Rubbing the baby with chalk she recites a brief blessing and places the child upon the ground. Until this rite has been performed mothers carefully avoid letting their infants touch the earth. The umbilical cord of each baby born to the compound is buried beneath the stones of the shrine.

Simple as it is, this rite embodies a fundamental relationship between individual, family and land which is the crux of personhood in Ohafia. To question whether someone was ever placed on ezi ra ali is among the gravest of insults. Such a remark suggests that the person has no home, no family -- that they are, in effect, not a person at all. Ezi ra ali means 'compound and land'. In this context 'compound' refers to much more than a cluster of buildings. It is the physical manifestation of the paternal group in space and time, a history of occupation in which a place comes to represent the people, past and present, who have occupied it. The rite of ezi ra ali is an enactment of this identification between person, paternal descent and place. It is a rite of placement, positioning each new child within a terrain, social, spatial and temporal. As children grow older and come to know this terrain they find that it is etched with its own history which is their history as well. In the paternal compound in Ohafia, where generations have resided in the same place for centuries, the successive lives of those inhabitants, whose collective existence anthropologists attempt to capture in the notion of 'patrilineage,' are not only inscribed upon, but are constitutive of, the habitat itself. Naming practices also reflect the sense in which each person is understood, at a fundamental level, to be a living manifestation of the cumulative force of his paternal descent. Men's and women's names consist of their given names followed by their father's name and then their grandfather's name. This is usually the extent to which a name is given for social or legal purposes. But a person's full name is understood to go on and on, from father to father ad infinitum.

In Ohafia, as boys grow up they learn to have a particular kind of relationship with their bodies, one which links their sense of their own masculinity with the ancestral traditions of Ohafia. When a baby boy cuts his first teeth the occasion is celebrated and he is said to have "cut his first head." This bodily transformation is the first in a series of events which are considered to be equivalent to head taking. Customarily, when a baby boy cuts his first tooth neither the mother or father will comment publicly on the matter. They will wait until the auspicious event is noted by a friend or relation. Sometimes this is even prompted by the mother who may complain that the baby has something wrong with his mouth and will ask the friend to examine him. Once it is announced that the baby has "cut his first head" the bearer of this news is responsible to sponsor the celebration of the event. The cutting of first teeth is also celebrated for baby girls. However it is not referred to as "cutting a head" and the celebration is not as elaborate as that for boys. Instead it is said that "she has asked us not to go to the farm," because the family must stay home from work in honor of the occasion.

The traditional rites for girls had largely fallen out of practice by the time Nigeria gained independence in 1960. A limited form of femal circumcision involving removal of the clitoral hood was performed shortly after birth as were male circumcisions. These operations were somewhat perfunctory, and were performed without the ritual elaborations often associated with circumcision in Africa. Because of the absence of symbolic significance attached to circumcision, when medical clinics became established in Ohafia, medical doctors rapidly assumed responsibility for male circumcisions and the practice of female circumcision was abandoned.

When a boy reaches the age of seven or eight his father will provide him with a bow and arrows. These he learns to use in contests with other boys, shooting at balls of rolled leaves or other targets. He develops his skill with the bow because he must eventually kill a small bird. When this is accomplished he is said to have "cut his second head." A celebration follows in which the boy ties the dead bird to the end of his bow and marches through the village proclaiming his victory and singing that his age mates who have not yet killed birds are cowards (ujoo) Those of his age mates who have also "cut their second heads" will join him.

His father will dress him in a fine wrapper and the procession will travel through the village visiting his kinspeople who give him yams and small amounts of money. In many cases it is through this process that the young boy first comes to know his maternal relations, many of whom, by virtue of the dispersed residence of the maternal family, he may never have met. Hence, at the age of seven or eight the young boy constitutes, through this first act of manhood, a new social role for himself. It is a role that allows him to ally himself with his accomplished age mates and to distinguish himself from the "cowards." He is allowed to dress in finery reserved for adults and he becomes a person of interest to his maternal family, the people who will ultimately grant him land and livelihood.

Young boys confided in me that some now use the rubber slingshots which are available at local markets to kill the birds. These simple weapons have a much greater range and accuracy than the traditional bow. But if they do acquire their birds in this manner they must keep it a secret. Elders insist that the boys must use the bows, not because of the greater test of skill, but, as one man explained: "because we must not forget how to use the weapons that our ancestors used." This remark should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia. It is an expression of the fact that, in marking this step in the transition from childhood to manhood, it is not the killing that is important but the production and reproduction of a particular bodily praxis, one rooted in ancestral knowledge. Sometimes, enthusiastic boys are encouraged to raise their own war dance, complete with a small oyaya. In Ohafia it is not enough to remember the stories of warriors of the past. Various rites and performances are specifically aimed at somatically transmitting the knowledge of the Ohafia warrior. Whether this knowledge is embodied in aesthetically structured performance, such as the war dance, or in ceremonial constraints such as the sanctions surrounding the nnu nnu mbu (bird killing rite), the performed aspects of ancestral practices are considered crucial to the preservation of Ohafia identity.

Find below, pictures of Okwanko masquerade, Akanu Ohafia, Carved figures in Obu, Asaga Ohafia, The Ohafia War Dance (iri agha), Obu House.

STROKE PART 1 by Dr. Chin Akano

STROKE Part 1

Today we shall be discussing a very serious medical condition known as stroke. Like we already know stroke is a major killer and one of the major causes of disability in the population.

What is stroke?

Stroke is that medical emergency used to be known as a Cerebro-Vascular accident (CVA) . The term CVA has now being dropped for STROKE. Stroke occurs when the blood supply to the brain or part of the brain is restricted or cut off . Like all organs, the brain needs oxygen and nutrients provided by blood to function properly and when the blood supply is compromised the brain cells begin to die eventually leading to brain damage and eventually brain death if the compromise is not arrested. The brain tissue ceases to function if deprived of oxygen for more than 60 to 90 seconds and after approximately three hours it will suffer irreversible injury possibly leading to death of the tissue. This death of the tissue is known as infarction.

If a blood vessel supplying blood and oxygen to the brain is blocked , for example by a blood clot preventing any blood reaching a part of the brain a stroke will occur. This type of stroke is known as ischaemic stroke and this constitutes more than 80% of all cases of stroke. There is also the other type of stoke which constitutes about 20% of all cases of stroke which occurs when a blood vessel is damaged and blood leaks out into the brain tissue. This is known as the haemorrhagic stroke

There are other important facts about stroke that i want us to be aware of as follows:

Prompt treatment is crucial and essential

The sooner a person receives treatment for a stroke, the less damage is likely to happen.

Stroke is currently the second leading cause of death in the western world ranking after heart disease

It causes 10% of deaths worldwide.

Evidence shows that stroke will soon become the commonest cause of death worldwide

It is the greatest single cause of severe disability in most countries of the world
Anybody can suffer a stroke irrespective of age, sex or race

The incidence of stroke increases rapidly from 30 years of age
95% of strokes occur in people age 45 and older
Two-thirds of strokes occur in those over the age of 65
A person's risk of dying if he or she does have a stroke also increases with age.
if you have a first-degree relative who had a stroke at an early age (under 50) you're at higher risk
Having had a stroke in the past greatly increases one's risk of future strokes.
Men are 25% more likely to suffer strokes than women
60% of deaths from stroke occur in women.
The risk of stroke is higher in Africans, Carribeans and Asians


Moving forward, let us look at who is at risk of developing stroke.

* Those suffering from blood pressure (hypertension) are more liable to developing stroke. Infact hypertension causes about 35-50% cases of strokes
* Smokers are also at increased risk of developing stroke
* Those suffering from Diabetes Mellitus (Diabetes) have 2-3 fold increased risk of stroke.
* Those whose cholesterol level is high has a two fold risk of developing stroke.
* Those who have problem with their heart rhythm problem known as Atrial Fibrillation (AF) have a very high risk of developing stroke
* Those suffering from Sickle cell disease also have are at risk of developing stroke. About 10-15% of children with this disease suffer stroke.
* childbirth also puts women at risk of developing stroke
*Menopause also puts women at risk of developing stroke, the risk is increased in those on hormonal replacement therapy (HRT)
* Those who have suffered a previous stroke or transient ischaemic attack (TIA) are also more liable to developing stroke
* Old Age-- The older one gets the more liable he/she is to developing stroke.

How can stroke be recognised? By this i mean the signs and symptoms of stroke.
The functions of the different parts of the body are controlled by different parts of the brain, so the symptoms vary depending on

* The part of the brain affected
* The size of the brain affected
* Duration in which the brain part is starved of oxygen and blood.

To be continued……

Thanks for reading

Dr Chin Akano

M.I, DJ JIMMY JATT LIVE IN UMUAHIA, ABIA STATE.

Today, June 8th witnesses another great feat in Abia Entertainment sector as M.I (Mr Incredible), African no 1 DJ, Jimmy Jatt, Don Lulu, Hon. Eric Nwadinobi( S.A Diaspora Affairs,Ben Tv video), Question Mark Entertainment, Lagos, Alozie Alonze of Silver Bird's most beautiful girl & several upcoming artistes like, Eagle Badge etc thrill Abians to a night of fun. In the media stables, we have Sound City, Ben TV London.
It can be recalled that the Nation was recently thrown into mourning and something of this nature is welcome at least to brighten our faces, even in the face of mourning.

Abia's social life has come back to life. Abia Post was live to capture the event which not only is well attended, but successfully executed. All thanks to 2FLAME Entertainment, De Latinos Event Centre & night club and those who made this a reality. Once more, WELCOME TO ABIA STATE - LAND OF HOSPITALITY.