Growing up can be fun, glorious, a disaster or even confusing for some people. Mine was full of fun but it was also confusing. As a little girl I grew up in a family where church and prayer time was by 'power' and by 'might'. By 'power', because the decision to attend church or pray lay with our parents, so you were powerless. By 'might' because if you didn’t do as they said, you’d receive your freely given stripes of the cane or you'd fetch water or stay indoors while others played, as punishment.

Parents had all the powers. So every morning after each “our father who art in heaven” a compulsory passage you must memorize I'd run outside the house to look for a special corner where I will be alone and begin to watch the sky to see if I could catch a glimpse of God. I'd sit for hours wondering what particular area God lived in heaven believing the sky to be heaven. But always I was unable to figure out the exact spot. I would look up to the sky, my supposed heaven and ask myself: if God created man and woman who created God? Who were his wife, his parents, his grand parents and the great grand parents? But answers to these questions I never get to know as my mother would begin calling at that time for me to wash the plates, my most hated chore, as a child. Sometimes I'd wonder why they couldn't go to bed without eating so I didn’t have to wash plates in the morning so I'd hide some under the cupboard, but how my mother would always find out my action, left me confused.

One belief in my mind at that tender age was that the world was too big for one man to create in seven days. I never stopped to wonder how God did it. Tired of thinking, I’d run to my mother, itching to find out more from her. Sometimes she satisfied my curiosity, other times she did not. But I found myself going to her yet again to find out more. I itched to know why things were the way they were. My mother with enough on her hands, tried to figure out how best to answer my questions without confusing me further but my father could not keep up with the pace, as he found that my questions never ended. My mother devised a means of answering my questions. She began to tell me folk stories and within each story came a desire to tell that same story to some else. Stories are alive in the minds of those who tell them and they try very hard to make the story alive in the minds of those to whom they tell the story. Now you know how I came to be a storyteller, I’m going to do my best to bring my stories alive in your minds.