It was one of those Sundays in Lagos when the city seemed to hum with a single heartbeat. In Ago-Okota, families in their Sunday best hurried toward church, traders wove through the crowd with carts piled high with fruits, while yellow buses and tricycles blared impatient horns through the narrow, restless roads.

I was on my way to church when a scene stopped me in my tracks at Green Field Bus Stop. A tricycle slowed to a halt. From it stepped a man in dark glasses, his hand wrapped firmly around the tiny fingers of a little girl. Behind him came a woman, also blind and guided gently by a small boy. Then the last of their companions appeared: a third child.

The children were no more than nine, seven, and five years respectively, yet they walked with the calm authority of guardians, their small feet moving with quiet courage, carrying a responsibility far heavier than their years. They were not begging. They were heading to church!

I watched the family vanish into the church gates of Trinity House like a quiet miracle. Who were they? What kind of love and strength raised children to lead the blind with such confidence?

That question drove me across Lagos days later to Prince Adewale Ajayi Street, in the Abaranje, Ikotun area of Lagos, where I traced the family to a humble two-room apartment. There, I met Stanley Theophilus and his wife, Victoria Uchechukwu Ekesi , a blind couple whose story reads like the gospel of perseverance itself.

From light to darkness

Neither Stanley, 47, nor Victoria, 28, was born blind. For both, the thief was the same, measles!

Stanley grew up in the quiet village of Obiezena, in Owerri, Imo State. His childhood was adventurous and untamed. He walked before he was six months old, chasing after a loyal dog that never left his side. It was that dog that first betrayed the secret of his journey into darkness.

?Whenever the dog ran left, I went right,? he began. ?My young mother, a victim of rape whose parents refused to marry her off to my father, grew alarmed when she noticed my eyes had turned a strange shade of blue. I was rushed to the hospital where a missionary doctor diagnosed measles damage. He operated on one eye and instructed my family to bring me back after a year for the second surgery.

?But village life was full of distractions, and the follow-up never came. Instead, an accident during a childhood game caused blood to gush from the operated eye for months. The untreated damage spread and plunged me into total darkness,? he recalled with pain.

For Victoria who hails from Nawfijah, in Orumba South Local Government Area of Anambra State, blindness came in painful stages between the ages of three and eight. ?It started with my writing going crooked on the slate. I was taken to the hospital. But the doctor made the worst mistake. Instead of starting with the bad eye, he operated on the good one. That was how the season of my sight ended,? she said in a cold voice filled with aching resentment.

A childhood of loss

Victoria?s young life was shadowed by grief. Her mother died when she was five, her grandmother passed when she was ten, and later her father. She moved between relatives, studied up to Junior Secondary School in Abuja, and later lived with an uncle in Onitsha. The Anglican Church, according to her, sponsored her WAEC examination. She pushed herself further , earning a degree in Peace and Conflict Resolution from the National Open University, and another degree in Mass Communication at the University of Lagos. She thereafter served at a school for the blind in Abuja during her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

Stanley?s story carried its own burdens. Raised by his grandmother after his mother left for Lagos, he learned survival early.

?At ten,? he said, ?I could weed three to five plots by hand, fetch 25 litres of water and carry firewood for my grandmother who had waist pain. Once, I sat on a snake, mistaking it for a log. Neighbours reached out to my mother, telling her I might not survive village life. She brought me to Lagos in 1991 and enrolled me in a special school for the blind.?

Love beyond sight

At this point, the conversation turned to love, the kind that survives hunger, humiliation, and hopelessness.

With a smile, he continued: ?It was in 2013, in a classroom for the visually impaired at Isheri Olofin, Lagos, that destiny drew our paths together. We understood each other?s pain, having gone through similar tragedy??

He paused at this point, as Victoria squeezed his hand, interrupting his flow. Tilting her head as though listening to a memory only she could hear, her face broke into a soft smile that seemed to light up her sightless eyes.

She resumed the tale of love: ?I saw beyond obstacles. I just saw a nice person with a kind heart, a man who doesn?t smoke, who doesn?t drink and doesn?t beat women. I met others before I met him??

She paused, the smile fading into something more guarded. ?Some of them were not my type. Some were violent. Some were saucy and irritating.? She shook her head, brushing away the ghosts of the past. Then she turned toward Stanley, her face open and tender. ?But with him? it was different. I felt safe.?

Stanley sat quietly, lips twitching into the faintest of smiles , the kind that belongs to a man unaccustomed to praise but deeply moved by it. His hands tightened over hers, not in possession, but in gratitude. At that moment, I could tell their world might be dark, but they see each other more clearly than most sighted people ever would.

The challenges

But the smile faded almost as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the heaviness of unspoken burdens. Victoria?s voice slowed, as though each word carried the weight of years.

?Despite two degrees, I am still battling the twin struggles of joblessness and the daily demands of caring for our three children. I have submitted my CV to several companies, but not a single reply has come. There is no steady income, no financial cushion , just the relentless grind of survival.

?The hardship has made even basic treats like biscuits for the children a luxury. Sometimes when they ask, I feel frustrated not because I don?t love them, but because we simply don?t have the means to provide. I make insecticide. Producing it is not the problem but marketing is. We end up spending the capital.?

Stanley leaned forward, his hand instinctively finding Victoria?s, their fingers interlocking like two people clinging to the same lifeline in an endless storm.

He continued from where his wife stopped . ?I thank God for how He has been with us,? he began, each word deliberate. ?When the children were still toddlers, it was hectic. Even going out to buy something was war. Sometimes, we would be hungry not because food wasn?t somewhere to be found, but because there was no one to send.

?After my mother died, things got worse. In church, after service, I would sit alone while people passed me. Church closed at 12 noon, but I would still be there at 3 p.m., until the person locking the doors would finally help me to the bus stop. Sometimes I just sat there, telling God, ?If only You could open my eyes, even a little? so I could live with others.??

The situation, according to him, continued until their first child turned five and became the couple?s light and guide.

?She takes us anywhere we want to go. Sometimes, the second one takes her mother to Ikotun market. But my first daughter is the one who takes me to programmes?.

Begging not an option

For Stanley, begging was never an option, and pity was a language he refused to learn. He said he had made a covenant with himself and with God never to stretch out a hand in begging on the streets with his wife and children, no matter how dark the road became.

To him, blindness was not a sentence to helplessness but a challenge to awaken the senses that still worked. He pointed to others who had turned their limitations Into strengths, mentioning names of blind comedians who made people laugh, blind preachers who moved hearts, and his own wife, who reads the Bible in Braille and taught in churches, leaving congregations awestruck.

He maintained that sight was only one sense among many; ?the real tragedy is not blindness, but failing to put the others to work.?

The struggle to pay rent

Yet, the dream that once burned simply to survive has grown far bigger but so too has the struggle to turn it into a means of feeding his family.

He disclosed that the rent of their apartment was due, and that invitations to play piano or drum have stopped coming. His voice tightened with the sting of injustice as he recounted how many churches allegedly shut their doors to him, preferring to pay outsiders N100,000 for just two hours of singing , people who, in his words, ?cannot even hold a tune for four hours like I can.?

Plea for lifeline

With quiet urgency, he pleaded for a lifeline, not charity, but opportunity, from Nigerians.

He said : ?From the special school I attended, I learned vocational skills: keyboard, drums, and cosmetics. After school, I pushed myself into End Time Music School, using every little programme I had done before, to train myself. Today, that music is what is feeding my family because I have no other job.

?But it is not easy to find a big church that truly values me, pays well, and respects my skill. I have sung my heart out, sweating for hours, only to walk away with nothing, while others who cannot sing for one hour are given N100,000. I can sing four, five hours non-stop, and still play the keyboard at the same time but it feels like my blindness is the first thing they see, not my gift.

?I am appealing to Nigerians to help me get signed to a record label. I have albums sitting unreleased because I cannot afford to produce the video or promote them on social media. My 2019 song Your Grace is online, but without funds for a video, airplay, or proper promotion, it?s just there, unnoticed.

?Give me just one chance,? Stanley?s voice quivered , not with doubt, but with the weight of years spent proving himself to a world that still looks away. ?If I fail, drop me but I won?t fail. I have my own patterns, my own sound. I know what?s trending, and I can flow in every style: English, Yoruba, Igbo. I know what I carry. It?s in my bones, in my spirit, in every note I play. I just need someone to believe enough to let me show it,? he pleaded passionately. (Saturday Vanguard)

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