Born in Kalpohene, Tamale, in the Northern Region of Ghana a little before the 90's, my world view as a child was perhaps no different from that of my peers elsewhere. With my mum as a teacher and my dad a social worker, we lived a simple but happy life--and I quickly learned to be content with the opportunities life sent my way. I attended a local public school close to home, and just as I had started to form my niche of friends, my family had to make a very unexpected resettlement to Accra. This was due to a bloody conflict which broke out in most of the Northern Region in the mid-nineties.

In the nation's capital, I begun second grade at Adenta Community School (ACS), a local elementary school which opened the same year we moved to our new home in Adenta. In several ways, I felt a bit alien at school partly because of the cultural changes I had to make living in my new southern community, but perhaps more signficantly because I had been suddenly and completely cut-off from all my friends in Tamale. However it wasn't long before I started speaking Twi and Ga like most of my new schoolmates, and I eventually settled well in school. Like most public schools in Ghana, we had our fair share of very limited educational resources and sometimes no teachers for certain classes. It almost seemed there was already an upper-bound to what one could could expect from life. My only consolation was the fact that my school had a relatively new building, and was only a 15-minute walk from my home. But for a few dedicated teachers who spurred me on, perhaps that consolation may have been my upper-bound. For instance, I will forever remain indebted to Ms. Christine Awudi, who willingly combined my fourth grade class with her fifth grade class for close to a year when our regular teacher fell seriously ill and showed no signs of recuperating before the end of the academic year. With no additional remuneration or special recognition as incentive, Ms. Awudi was surely part of only a few teachers in the public school system who could manage such sacrifice and selflessness. After eight years of hardwork and many blessings, I graduated as the top student from ACS and gained admission to Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School (PRESEC).