I grew up in a small riverside village in southern Nigeria where everybody’s future was already written before they were born. If your father was a fisherman, you became one. If your mother sold garri in the market, you inherited her wooden table and rusty scale. Nobody questioned the cycle because survival was more important than dreams.
My father used to tell me, “A river that forgets its source will dry up.”
So after secondary school, while my friends traveled to Port Harcourt to learn welding, driving, and oil servicing jobs, I stayed behind to help him paddle his canoe across the muddy waters every morning at 4 a.m.
At first, I convinced myself it was honour.
But deep inside, I hated that life.
Every evening, I would sit beside the old community primary school staring at the cracked walls and broken windows. The village children barely knew how to read. Some teachers came only twice a week because the road to our village was terrible during the rainy season.
One afternoon, an elderly woman named Mama Ebi found me teaching a group of children under the mango tree with a torn English textbook.
She laughed and said, “So this is what keeps you here?”
I smiled awkwardly.
Then she said something that stayed in my head for years:
“Everybody follows the river because it is easy. Few people dig wells.”
That night, I made the decision that changed my life.
Instead of saving money to buy a bigger fishing boat like my father wanted, I secretly used my savings to rent a tiny abandoned shop near the village square. I cleaned it, repaired the leaking roof, and turned it into a reading center for children.
The whole village mocked me.
“A man teaching ABC while others are making money.”
“Books won’t feed anybody.”
Even my father stopped speaking to me for weeks.
The real pain came when my closest friend, Tari, betrayed me. He told people I had joined a foreign church organization that was using village children for rituals. In African communities, rumours spread faster than wildfire in harmattan.
Parents began withdrawing their children.
One evening, angry youths stormed the reading center and destroyed the benches I had built with my own hands.
I remember sitting alone in the dust after they left, staring at the broken planks, wondering if everybody had been right about me.
Maybe the road less traveled was less traveled for a reason.
I nearly gave up.
Then the twist came.
Three months later, severe flooding hit nearby communities. Schools shut down for weeks, but because my little center was built on slightly higher ground, displaced children gathered there daily. I continued teaching them with the few books I had left.
One afternoon, a woman arrived in a white Hilux vehicle covered in mud. She introduced herself as an education officer working with a state outreach program. She had heard children in temporary camps were still learning somewhere deep inside the village.
She asked who owned the center.
I raised my hand nervously.
She spent hours watching me teach mathematics with charcoal on plywood because we had no whiteboard.
Before leaving, she simply said, “You chose a difficult road.”
I laughed bitterly.
“You have no idea.”
Weeks later, officials returned with supplies, books, solar lamps, and grants. My tiny reading center became the foundation for the first proper community learning hub in the area.
The same villagers who once called me useless began sending their children.
But the biggest shock came from my father.
One evening, after months of silence, he walked quietly into the center while I was arranging books. He looked around at the children reading aloud under bright solar lights.
Then he placed his old fishing paddle on the table.
“My father gave this to me,” he said softly. “But your own river is different.”
That was the first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.
Years later, people started calling me “Teacher” instead of “Fisherman’s Son.”
And sometimes I think about how close I came to abandoning that lonely path.
The road less traveled nearly destroyed me before it revealed where it was leading.
Image by chatgpt