Beginnings

"I learned early that a family is a kind of country, and the older sister, its first ambassador."

She was born on the 27th of January, 1946, the second of eleven children, a position that would quietly define the shape of her life. Her father worked for colonial officials and, later, the Nigerian Ports Authority, and the household carried both the discipline of service and the warmth of a large Obudu family.

She grew up in Calabar, where the rain comes with intention and the markets sing in many tongues. Among ten siblings she became something between sister and second mother, folding clothes, settling small disputes, walking the younger ones to school. The instincts that would later shape thousands of lives were formed in those early mornings.

By the time she finished her schooling she had already decided: she would teach. She would marry. She would build something durable. None of these were small ambitions for a young woman in the late 1950s. All of them she would do.