Destiny Brought Me Here College
She was posted to Benue but wanted Lagos.
She couldn't imagine herself serving for a whole year in Benue State far away from Lagos by road.
Her Mum called her childhood friend working at National Youth Service Corps to help facilitate a change to Lagos State.
The friend promised to help the young lady return to Lagos state in no time.
It was time to go to camp, she moved a few of her things with the belief that she will return to Lagos soon.
Everyday, she would check her phone to be sure that she didn't miss any text from her Mom's friend but nothing came in.
She heard that one can relocate if one has a critical health condition.
She tried to fake medical reports and cases. She submitted the faked documents stating that she had a terrible health condition to some NYSC officials.
Her appeal form and documents were trashed mistakenly.馃檰馃徑♀️
She had heard of some people with lesser cases than the one she wrote there who were granted relocation the same day but couldn't understand why she didnt get a response after 3 days.
After camp, she got her posting letter, opened it and almost started crying. She was posted to one of the most remote areas in the land to serve for the remaining 11months.馃槩
She called her Mum, started crying and asked the Mum to beg the friend to help her out.馃槶
In the meantime, she moved to the designated area and presented herself to the school.
For the first two weeks, she would go to the class and not teach but was always on the phone speaking with Mum and expressing her displeasure about the place.
While still looking for a way out, she remembered how that her dream as a child was to be a teacher and how that she was well-known in her University back in the day as a Tutorial master.
She started teaching from her heart with passion and style. The students liked her.馃グ
Everyday, students would bring fruits of all sorts for her. Some would bring raw packages from rice, beans, vegetables, tomatoes to yam every week.
She was having food stuffs for free and receiving allawee steadily.馃拑馃徎馃拑馃徎
She even started doing group lessons every day after school for as low as N100 per student.
She started with 30 but grew to 100 within 4 weeks as students from other schools joined. Her income was increasing.
Her impact was so felt that students in farther villages started coming for the classes. Right before her eyes, about 352 had gathered within 3months.
She couldn't handle it, she had to engage 2 corps members to join her and would pay them N4000 daily each.
One of the students' father was a Chief. His son had always told him about the teacher, how he enjoys the lesson and the way he is taught more than the way his private school teachers do.
The father decided to reward the lady with a land space big enough to build a lesson centre.
She accepted and built a wooden lesson centre from the money she had saved and employed two other teachers.
The number of students became a bit steady and predictable. 400 at least daily.
With 2 months to go in her service year, she decided to convert the lesson to a school of N300 daily in the morning plus lesson of N100 in the evening.
About 200 students from the lesson joined the school in the morning. Evening session reduced to 300 students but that was fine.
Let me do small calculation here:
Morning - 200 students X N300 daily =N60,000
Evening - 300 students X N100 daily = N30,000
Wowwwww!!馃槼
Her total profit was N50,000 everyday after removing cost.
After 2 months, with some extra support from the Chief, she built a school about 2 storey with blocks, painted it, did a nice gate, got whiteboards in all the classes and roofed it well.
She named it 'Destiny Brought Me Here College'.
Not all seemingly 'misfortunes' are misfortunes.
Wipe your eyes, embrace the present and do what you can do with what you have well.
Oluwapelumi Awe
Africa's Most Creative Event Host
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