Our conversation began with a film.

She was talking about Titanic, about the scene where a young man’s life changes almost overnight. One day he has nothing. The next, he is on the grandest ship in the world, drinking champagne among people who would never normally share a table with him.

She liked that idea. The sudden turn, the possibility that life can change quickly and that prosperity isjust around the corner.

Then the question came back to her. Had her own life ever changed like that?

She looked at herself, as if measuring the distance between the woman she had been and the woman sitting there now.

“Looking at me now,” she said, “these are two different people.”

A little later, she said it even more simply: “I lost my touch.”

She did not mean only beauty, or age, or appearance, though those things were part of it. She meant something deeper. A feeling of being less herself. A feeling that the life she had once built had moved away from her.

There was a time when she lived differently. She studied accounting. Before that, she had wanted to become a pilot, but school results changed the direction of that dream. So she followed another path. She went into banking and worked for ten years in Gaborone.

She enjoyed that life. It gave her independence. It gave her a role. It allowed her to help others.

“I was the one who was taking care of my family,” she said.

That sentence matters. It is easy, when meeting someone in a difficult season, to see only the difficulty. But she was not always someone waiting for help. She was a worker, a daughter, a mother, a sister, a provider. She had carried people before.

Now much of her life is organised around caring for her mother.

Her mother has diabetes and needs insulin. The medicine is not just a medical detail; it shapes the family’s choices. If insulin is not available locally, there may be a long journey to Gaborone. If it is available nearby, it may be expensive. Either way, the responsibility is heavy.

Caregiving has made her world smaller. She spends much of her time indoors with her mother. Going outside, meeting people, talking for a while. These small things become large when life has narrowed around illness, routine, and worry.

She does not speak about her situation with self-pity. But there is sadness in the way she describes the change.

“I don’t feel like this is me,” she said.

What hurts most is not only the lack of money. It is the loss of independence.

She does not like asking. She does not like waiting for someone else to decide whether to give. She wants to stand on her own feet again.

“I don’t like that kind of life,” she said. “I want what’s my own.”

That desire runs through everything she says. When she speaks about money, it is not only about comfort. At first, she says she wants to be rich; Maybe a millionaire. There is humoor in the conversation, but also seriousness. When asked what she would do with that money, she does not speak only of herself.

She would start businesses. She would hire people. She would open a private school, an English-medium school. She would help people who are poor. She would build a place for people living on the streets so they would not have to sleep outside. She would help them learn a trade.

She remembers a time when she had more money and could still be kind with it.

“I used to go to the village every month,” she said, “and then I would buy food for older people.”

So when she dreams of money, she is dreaming of power, but not power over others. Power to act. Power to care. Power to be useful again.

Her family story stretches across places. Botswana. South Africa. Gaborone. Relatives across the border. A father she remembers with love. A son who mainly lives with his father, a man she still describes as good, even though the relationship did not work. Her life is not a simple line. It is a web of duty, affection, separation, memory, and responsibility.

She speaks of aging with honesty. To grow is good, she says, but growing older is not easy. There is no romance in losing strength, losing confidence, or watching the self you knew become harder to find.

Still, she does not give up on change.

Again and again, she returns to the possibility that things can become better. It may not happen like a film. There may be no grand staircase, no champagne, no sudden arrival among the rich. But life can still shift. A bus ticket can matter. A vial of insulin can matter. A conversation can matter.

Near the end, after all the talk of money, medicine, family, and dreams, she says something small and quietly powerful. Meeting people makes her happy. Talking makes her happy. Making friends makes her happy.

It is a simple thing to say. But in the context of her life now, it carries weight.

Because she has not lost everything. Not her warmth. Not her kindness. Not her ability to imagine a different future. Not the part of her that still wants to build something, give something, and belong to the world outside her door.

She may feel she has lost her touch.

But listening to her, it is clear that something remains: dignity, hope, and the stubborn belief that life can still change.