My mother started selling banku and palm nut soup in the year 2000. Not because she loved cooking for strangers — but because she loved my father and believed in his dream. He was an electrician, building our house brick by brick, and she sold food every day so that dream could happen faster.

Then, in February 2003, my father died. He left behind five children, a house that wasn't finished, and a widow who now had to do everything alone. I was the fourth of those five children.

My father's family forced us off the land near our house where my mother used to sell — the land belonged to the family, and they took it back. So my mother moved. 30 to 40 minutes' walk away from our home. No storage. No room. Every morning we carried the pots out. Every evening we carried them back.

We did this from 2003 to 2012. Nine years. Until my mother finally found a plot close to our house and could move back to the junction. There was no foundation to call. No charity to help a widow with five children. No one came.

After school, while other children played with friends, I carried black pots on my head. That was my life for years. I had no friends in my area. When people saw me coming with those pots, they saw poverty. And poverty pushes people away.

To buy textbooks, I sold things at school — oranges, biscuits, anything. Before school, I sold yam and charcoal in the neighbourhood. I went to school with an empty stomach and no money. When it was break time, I ran to my mother's stall, ate quickly, and ran back. That was my lunch.

80% of what we ate, all year, was the banku and palm nut soup my mother hadn't sold. The same pot, day after day, week after week.

After school, I didn't walk home with friends. I walked alone, through the bush, and I cried. I cried to God. Not because I had given up — but because I had no one else to tell.

And God answered. Not just with one door — He opened a whole hallway of doors.

When my father died in 2003, my mother became a widow with five children and no safety net. There was no foundation. No charity. No support system that reached us. No one knocked on our door. No one paid a school fee. No one gave us a bag of rice or a pack of sanitary pads.

I am building this foundation because that absence should never exist again. Not for a widow. Not for five children. Not for a girl using cloth as a pad. Not for a child who has to choose between eating and studying.

I am not helping from theory. I lived it. I know what it means to walk into a classroom hungry. I know what it means to have no one look at you and say, "I see you. You can make it."

The Odontwe Hope Foundation is named for my father — the man who dreamed, built, and left too soon. His name will now open doors for children the way those doors were never opened for us.

I didn't have a foundation. I didn't have a mentor. I didn't have a scholarship, a laptop, a pad, or a friend who understood poverty. I had my Bible, my mother's pot, and God.

That was enough — but it shouldn't have to be the only option.

You can change that. One child at a time. Please share this story. Share it in every corner. Share it for the young ones who don't have hope like I didn't have — so they know: if I made it, they can make it too.