I AM AFRICAN: Muyiwa Okunlola

My name is Olumuyiwa Okunlola and I am African.

I am from Nigeria, that’s where I was born.

I love reading, I also really love music.

My family is made up of five basic members,  my dad, my mom and three boys.

My family decided that me and my brothers would leave our conventional school in Jos, Nigeria and so we decided that we would start our own school and we decided to start it in our own house and so on.

And so it was just me, my two brothers and one of our cousins to start the school.

We valued the biblically based education of Accelerated Christian Education and we wanted to stick with it.

My calling is in the field of Christian education. When I think about the future of the children of Africa what I want to see is a situation where these children first of all realize that they are valued, and then also realize that they have potential to go out and make a difference in the future, the future of our country, where our nations are going to end up in the future depends very much on what happens with them right now.

If they commit themselves to God’s principles and understand how He has designed the world to work, then it would be easy for them to be successful in whatever God calls them to do.

One of the reasons I came to school here in the US was because I felt the US would provide me with the best opportunity to understand the basic principles of Christian Education.

With all the unique challenges I face as an African  Christ has always been there to help me through and keep that vision of hope, that vision of things getting better before me.

I have such a heart for Nigeria, I want to see my country grow, I want to see my country get past all the challenges it has faced in terms of its identity, of its culture. I want to see Nigeria reach the potential that it could reach.

I believe some of the smartest people are in Nigeria, and I want to see Nigeria become all that it could be. And those kind of things, the passion in my heart for my country, those are the things that are most important to me about being Nigerian.

One of the things I hope for Africa is that we get out from under the bondage of having to receive money from people to improve ourselves. It has been said that Africa has enough resources to feed the rest of the world, it has been said that Africa has enough resources to care for itself.

If we have the resources, if we can do things for ourselves we should do things for ourselves. The Bible is very clear that each man should bear His own burden.

The government is not going to be the one to fix our problems, the western world’s not going to be the one to fix our problems.

We are going to have to figure out what does God want us to do in our own little community and work to change that.

And that is one of the things I am hoping through my involvement in education that I can change that our young people will begin to see that God has given us what we need to be able to be successful in the situations that we are in.