“You’re never going to pass this grade!” Bitterness along with a sincere sense of assurance accompanied these words and I was on the receiving end. If there’s such a thing as a person’s bad book, I would’ve probably made it on my teacher’s cover page. I was never a mischievous child. I was a typical teenage boy slightly bungle some. My lack of interest in academics and having failed three consecutive terms of my grade 9 ensured I strike my teacher as the naughty type.

I was born in the outskirts of Limpopo. I branched from a family tree whose roots are buried deeply in adversity, with such a pedigree, my life was what it was meant to be. When poverty held us in a submission hold, I felt as if though my soul had died and my body was waiting to catch up. Life was throwing lemons too sour to make tolerable lemonades out of. I was living between dying and dead. Resented life for what it was worth. Education was no exception.

There is an idiom that says “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I knew of it from a fairly young age, before I could even make sense of it. I was not the dumbest kid in school, but my teacher succeeded in making me feel like one. When she assured me that I was going to fail, I found motivation in what initiated as a rather rude remark. I spent my whole life with a stereotypical mind-set on the concept of failure. I failed to see what education is capable of,in the process, I added to the statistics that when given a choice, people often choose the wrong one.

A mountain of odds stood against me. The thought of failing was starting to feed on me. I knew that I needed at least two miracles to pull through, but giving my teacher the satisfaction was definitely out of option. How hard could reading a few sentences really be? memorising here and there? I sat down to embark on a journey that would change life forever. I studied, something I was foreign to. A word at a time, one giving birth to another. I grabbed a the bull by its horns and tossed it to my teacher’s face. I passed!!