Life Tales: A lady narrates how her family became successfull after investing In real estates.

 

"Growing up as a child, the hardship and hunger we faced was topnotch. My mom would go to women who sell ice-fish in our area and beg them for head of fish that some people reject. 

She uses the fish heads to prepare soup and stew that we will eat for two weeks. When our soup finish, we use our remaining stew to eat garri. 

We didn't have the choice of what to eat, we just eat anything God provides for the day. Sometimes we eat just once and then look for where to pluck pawpaw whether ripe or unripe and eat.

It got to a point that even when a soup looses taste or gets sour, my mum will portion it in a big plate for all of us and we must finish it no matter how nauseating it was.

The food we carry to school looks entirely different from that of our classmates, they would always make caricature of our food and sometimes we will hide to eat our food.

Despite the fact that we weren't feeding so well, our skin kept glowing and we looked more healthy than most of our classmates in school. We were so brilliant that our school proprietor picked special interest in us and would subsidize our fees for us.

We were always happy and satisfied, we still share our little food with visitors and other children in our neighborhood. You would never tell what we were going through. My parents were always lovey dovey, I never heard them raise a voice at each other or frown faces.

I didn't know they were saving money to buy lands until I heard it from my mom after my dad's demise. By then I was in junior secondary school, there were a lot of things surrounding his death

My mom called us all together and told us about the business she and my dad were doing. They bought 50plots of land from a community for N600k and they paid for it in installment. 

It was situated in a rural area and they were waiting for the lands to appreciate for them sell them and buy more. She said they bought those lands 8 years ago and plan to sell them after ten or fifteen years.

Because of the weight of financial responsibility on her, she had to sell a plot for N180k(it had appreciated). After she sold a plot, the people who sold that land to them began to make problem with her via access road and others.

It was obvious they just wanted to intimidate her because my dad was no more, she had to put the whole land for sale. Luckily, estate agents bought the land and she used the money to buy more lands in town.

She continued that business and it kept booming, with it she saw all six of us through the university, built two tenant houses through it and is still building more. People now count us amongst the top five richest families in our community.

Despite how much God has blessed us, we never throw away food, we don't leave leftovers. My mom still finds it hard to snap out of the fact that we are no longer poor.

She's still extremely economical, doesn't buy anything luxury, doesn't even want us to cook food for her with more than two protein else she will call it waste of money. 

She's so big on investment and economics, I learnt it from her and it has been helping me till today. I wish my dad is here to reap the fruits of his labour but unfortunately he is not and it hurts deeply".

Credit: The Humans of Abuja.