Every girl would love to live like a princess and have a life filled with adventures. It‘s almost undeniable that the melanin goddess, Lupita Nyong’o, is a legend both on screen and in everyday life.
Some may ask what drove Roy Allela—a 25-year-old man with perfect hearing, no speech impediments, and limited experience with sign language—to develop a solution to the challenges of hearing impairment. The answer? His love for his niece.
Three years down the road, as I attempt to small-talk with my Lyft driver, my unavoidable 'accent' that comes with living in the US, brings about different variations of essentially the same question: “I noticed you have an accent, where are you from?” Nigeria, is and will always be my answer, the pride and smile evident on my face. If you are foreign, do not be afraid or shy of your otherness.
January 1994, I was only 7years old. It was a cold, dry typical African morning. The tension in the hospital waiting room was almost palpable. The only sounds I could hear over the shrieking of the harmattan wind as it blew through the trees in the premises was of my mother and aunts sobbing. We had all rushed to the local hospital to visit an uncle who was reported to have collapsed at his home while preparing for work. Uncle Padosa and my father had a close friendship that even predated my parents' marriage and he was my dad's lawyer.
I started off in pageantry at seventeen. I initially wanted to do pageantry just because I was very low on self-confidence. I was bullied. Being an African in America is not easy. So, I went into it just thinking it was going to be fun but I didn’t realize how much pageantry would change my life.
