It was 20 long years before his feet first entered a pair of shoes, purely with the help of a friend and it was all exciting although that first experience left his feet with quite the blisters.
But already fascinated by the feeling of eventually having shoes covering his feet, Mr. Alex Tetteh did not allow his sores to be totally healed before he buried them back into those shoes again.
The feeling was akin to a baby's first feel of shoes on their feet and it was just right for him, particularly being a physically challenged person who had gone through a life of many turbulences.
In this episode of The Untold on GhanaWeb TV, we put the spotlight on the story of Mr. Alexander Tetteh, who might never have been the man he is now if his parents heeded to the counsel of his former headmaster to settle him in an apprenticeship, rather than get educated.
"When he completed his elementary year, he was not certified. He urged on. He went to Africa Advance, he was not holding support. I'll stand at the gate and when he's passing, you'll see him, 'Sir (gestures a wave)', all the time. I feel for him, suffering but he's not perturbed.
"One day, he was coming with his books, I don't know what happened and he fell. Quickly, he woke, patted his dress and then he said, 'Oh, I'm going to come.'
"One day, I called him to come over and I asked him why he was worrying himself, struggling for education. 'Your friends learn trade, they are stationed and they work on. Why this struggle?' He just laughed at the side of his mouth but I didn't understand. And then he said he was going to school and come and today, I've seen why he did so," Efo Emma explained.
He also recalls how daunting a task it was for him to perfectly fit into school amidst all the rejection he received from his mates basically because he always got to school untidy.
"I remember at school, nobody will like to sit by me because I crawled on the floor - and you can imagine, I crawled in the sand, and I became so dirty, so sweaty, and nobody would sit by me because at the school, there is this mono desk where two people sit but I was alone at my desk.
"And I remember I was so sad that when I came home, I told my mother I won't go to school again because nobody wants to get close to me, nobody wants to play with me and I was very young and wanted to play but my mother encouraged me to go," he narrated.
Watch the video below:
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