Being hopeful.

Chapter 1

Children, are the lights of the world. If you have kids, then you will understand what I am talking about. Children are soft minded, forgiving and loving. So I thought I was. As a little child, I thought I should be all that my parents ever needed. I thought I should be treated like a puppy. I needed to be nortured and Fortified into a man that I should be. I didn have to think about my daily bread, neither do I have to care so much about going to school because I wasn born by myself.

1989, I was only five years old, then my Dad went to Jail. My mom could not handle the situation, so I was taken to live with my grandmother in the village. Then my mother disappeared and never came back for me. Many nights I cried, hoping that shell be back. Days gone by, there was no traces of my mom coming back for me. My loving father is in jail, I heard people don usually go to jail and come back to still be themselves again, yet I waited for him to show up so I can continue to enjoy my childhood. But the waiting, will only take forever as there was nobody coming back for me.I had to stay strong. I didn really understand what was going on, but I was only left with a choice to be strong.

Five years gone by, Mother didn come back. 1995 my Dad got out of jail. He could no longer afford to live in Lagos, because he had lost everything, so he came to the village. My father finally showed up and it was a big moment for me. I was happy to see him again after a long time of being away without anyone to call my daddy. Ever since he had been away, and my mom was no where to be found, I have been craving for a sense of belonging. I was supposed to be completely happy to see him again, yes I was. But at the same time I was sad because he came back with sickness and diseases from prison.

My dad came back and become another liability to his mother. Grandmother did everything to ensure my dad was cleansed of all the sickness and diseases he came back with from the prison. He was taken to the hospital and after some months he had fully recovered. But my dad needed more healing, losing everything he had worked for and having gone to jail with a crime he didn commit, he got depressed. He was introduced to farming, the family had lots of land, so there was no problem acquiring land for farming, but for someone who had lived almost all his life in the city, farming was not something he wanted to do. Moreover, the fact that his wife ran away when he had problems, was heavy in his heart, all he wanted now was to go and search for his wife and bring the family back together.

So he left for the city in search of his wife. After few weeks, he returned to the village sad and disappointed. What he found out in Lagos was too heavy to share with me because he thought I was too little to understand or be bothered by it. But he had to share with his mother. The sad story was that when he got to the city my mother had moved on with another man. And they were already having kids together. My dad became more miserable than how he was when he got back from the prison. He would show up a couple of times to come and check on me at my Grannys because he couldn live with us. His mother already got him a place to live by himself and start a new life. But he couldn put himself together despite all my grandmothers efforts to make sure he stood back on his feet. He could not even work to take care of himself because he was so depressed. And so it went on.

My grandmother was kind enough to take care of me to the best of her ability. But she couldn do all, because she was only a farmer, she cannot afford to send me to school, she didn have the money. Grandmother didn want me, growing up in the village to become an ordinary farmer. She wanted me to be more. So I was moved back to the city to live with my Aunty, My fathers elder sister. Aunty Mary was a trader, while her husband worked as a nurse. When I moved in with them, I thought it would be just the same way it was with my grandmother, where I always got attention and everything I wanted.

My struggle to survive began at the age of eleven, when I moved in with my Aunty and her husband. The instructions from my grandmother was that I should be properly taken care of. That I should go to school, that my Aunty and her husband should ensure my wel