Making Nigerian Parents Stand Proud with Custom-Made Education

When Mrs Vienna was a child in a crowded classroom, she noticed something that would shape her entire life. She noticed that the children who fell behind weren’t stupid, they were ignored like they were invisible. She watched teachers move past them impatiently. She watched classmates laugh at them. And she felt it. Their confusion and shame. Their silent plea: “Someone, please, hold my hand and help me.”

While other children played, Mrs Vienna found herself drawn to those struggling students, sitting beside them, to explain things again and again until that moment when they finally understand. That feeling became her compass.

She thought she’d become a lawyer—a champion for people who needed help but couldn’t afford it. But she realized the world wouldn’t pay her to defend those who couldn’t pay her back. So she chose teaching.

But classroom teaching broke her heart in a different way. Forty children. One hour. One topic. There was no time to kneel beside the child who was lost and whisper, “It’s okay. Let’s go at your pace.” The system didn’t allow her to help them all.

So she stopped trying to fit into a system that wasn’t built for these children. She started teaching one child at a time. One family at a time. Homeschooling. Finally, she could go at each child’s pace.

Then she discovered something that changed everything.

Some children didn’t need academic help at all. They were bright, capable, beautiful souls, but they couldn’t speak. They couldn’t communicate. A mother would look at her with desperate eyes and say: “My daughter is six years old. She doesn’t talk. She only repeats sentences from cartoons. I just want to hear her say ‘Mama.'”

Vienna went back. She became a speech therapist. And today, she leads a team of specialists who do what she wished someone had done for those children in her childhood classroom:

They take their hands. They go at their pace. And they help them find their voice.