I feel impelled today to short circuit my way to 27 May 2026, the next CHILDREN’S DAY. None other than the 18-year-old girl I code named SG in the children’s day column of two years ago is the cause of it. I heard good news about her this week which I cannot hold until next year. SG was one of three girls whose story touched my heart in 2023. They all attended Lagos secondary schools. The first passed in annoying circumstances. She was troubled by sickle cell anaemia, was chronically anaemic and was continually pressed by her parents to make schooling her priority when they should have first attended to her health. Surprisingly, too, was the fact that neither her class teacher nor the school counsellor saw her death coming, even when she physically looked terribly ill and weak and, as her friends said, sometimes fainted in school. Her teacher and the counsellor would arrange for the sickly girl to be taken home to her parents. A few days later, she would return to school and her health would again regress in that vicious cycle. Why the school did not take her matter far more seriously I still do not understand. Was it a case of overpopulation in her school where about 100 girls huddled in a classroom and the teacher was overwhelmed with work everyday?
Mother of dad’s baby nurses medical school ambition
