Inspirations from My Mother: A Journey of Faith and Endurance: An Autobiography

By Mike Melvin

Inspirations from My Mother, a Journey of Faith and Endurance: An Autobiography is an epic journey of faith and endurance of a little boy born into a polygamous family in the village of Lekong in the deep hinterland of the rain forest of Cameroon, with big dreams installed in him by his mother who got blind during his teenage years.

Growing up in a poor polygamous family, Dr. Mike depended solely on his mother for everything, but his mother got blind during his first year in secondary (middle) school and died during his first year in high school. Though his mother was blind and dead, Dr. Mike refused to give up on himself and must endure all obstacles, faced his challenges, and built faith in God from his teenage age through adulthood to become the highly educated, family-loving, and responsible individual today due to the inspiration from his mother.

Determined to confirm the information that his child died at birth, Dr. Mike went searching for his teenage age girlfriend and, after seven years of search, discovered his daughter who was reported dead thirty-five years ago at birth by his girlfriend's uncle.

While his journey is filled with obstacles, Dr. Mike never gave up on being a family man, a loving husband, and a father. In his seven children, there is a graduate with a master's degree, one in the university, three in high school, one in middle school, and another in the vocational training academy. Dr. Mike is a grandfather to nine grandchildren.

Dr. Mike is the first of his siblings to graduate from college and to have earned a terminal degree, thanks to his blind mother, endurance, and faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885054201

Book preview

Title Page

Copyright © 2022 Mike Melvin

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 979-8-88505-419-5 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88505-420-1 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Village of My Birth, Lekong-Fontem

Chapter 2

Going to Primary School

Chapter 3

My Life in Munyenge Village

Chapter 4

My Life in Secondary and High School

Chapter 5

Life after High School

Chapter 6

The Quest for University Education

Chapter 7

The Mystery at University of Buea

Chapter 8

Feeling Abandoned

Chapter 9

My First Marriage

Chapter 10

The Struggle to Rebuild My Life

Chapter 11

My Ex-Wife Wanted Her Marriage Back

Chapter 12

My Travel to Belgium

Chapter 13

The Longest Eight Months of My Life

Chapter 14

Forced to Become an Illegal Resident in Belgium

Chapter 15

Coming to the United States of America

Chapter 16

The Offer to Pay My Fiancée Off

Chapter 17

Divorce Proceedings in Minnesota

Chapter 18

My Father-in-Law Died Three Days into My 2nd Wedding

Chapter 19

America, the Land That Gave Me Everything

Chapter 20

Painful Missing of My Daughter Andongmoh

Chapter 21

My Lost but Found Daughter Victorine

Chapter 22

Victorine’s Story Narrated by Victorine

Chapter 23

First Father-Daughter Hug in 35 Years

Chapter 24

Lesson from My life story

FOREWORD

A Tumultuous Life Story and Lessons Thereof

For the past 37 years of close friendship with Dr. Nkonchu Pius Nti, who later adopted the name Mike Melvin as part of adaptation in the USA, I am intimately familiar with and in some cases part of his life story narrated in this book. I find the story to be very rich, illuminating, and filled with a mix bag of feelings that span the entire spectrum of human emotions from suffering, frustration, and sadness to relief, happiness, and fulfilment. Mike and I and another close friend, David Aminakeo, first met at an early age in 1985 when we were together in the same school beginning our secondary education studies. We have remained friends since then.

Mike was born to Pa Nti Ben Nkemateh and Mami Martina Atemafac in Lekong Village in Fontem Subdivision (now known as Lebialem Division), Southwest Region of Cameroon, West Africa. This book is a detailed account of the journey from childhood in Lekong Village, where he attended primary school, to other cities in Cameroon in search of secondary and university education. The entanglements of adolescent and young adult life led to many consequences, some of which remained elusive till about 35 years later. For example, the lost and found daughter (Chapters 21–23). This part of the story is deeply emotional and can move the reader to tears, but I believe the reader comes out feeling stronger in their own emotional state and can use this example as a comforting reference point or inspiration on how to navigate their own current and/or future difficult adversities.

Earlier Mike’s marriage experiences were filled with adversities. The first marriage involved a moment of separation in Cameroon, a reunion in Europe, another separation in the USA, and eventually a divorce. These riveting moments are captured in Chapters 9–17. After the divorce, Mike resettled to start a second marriage which started under unsettling circumstances with the loss of his father-in-law on the eve of the wedding. His love encounters with women were blessed with children, one of them unknown to him for about 35 years, and the others caught up in the web of marriage woes. It is a fascinating read on how he navigated these troubled waters.

The last Chapter examines the impact that these challenges have had on Mike’s life and how these have helped to shape his life going forward. Lessons of faith, endurance, perseverance, and patience are evident, and how these can help to shape one’s life. The story is written from a layman’s perspective by simply recounting the story as-is, from Lekong Village to many cities and towns in Cameroon, Europe, and to the USA. Thus, it is my hope that everyone will find this book to be not just a fascinating, easy, and relatable read, but also as a treasure trove for experts in humanities, social scientists, screen casters, poets, etc who can adequately analyze the content to bring out the academic lessons from the story for today’s generation and generations to come.

Alexander Azenkeng, Ph.D.

Assistant Director for Critical Materials

University of North Dakota

Energy & Environmental Research Center

Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA

INTRODUCTION

My name originally is Nkonchu Pius Nti. I was born to my mother, Atemafac Martina, and my father, Nti Ben Nkemateh, in Fontem in the hinterland village of Lekong in the southwest region of Cameroon. My life journey has been difficult from the very beginning, which is the reason I decided to write my story to inspire my children and others that the road ahead may be difficult but with faith, you can always make it and that challenges are an integral part of growing up and living life. My experience in this journey called life may not be unique, but I am writing this to inspire those who may not see the road ahead that all is possible with God. The good news you will see in my story is the presence of God at every moment that I felt as if it was the end. Some of the situations may not make sense to everyone because of the setting in which they took place, so I will try at best to explain what it meant and the similarity in the Western world.

Today, I like to describe myself as a happy man even though I have not reached the point I will love to be or my full potential, but I am making progress. In some areas of the book, the focus is more on the people in my life at the time. This is not because of hate but because I want to set the record straight due to misinformation and characterization out there some of which have led to personal attacks on me in public places. Breaking the silence now for me is important because I have always felt that being quiet and walking away without a public show in an emotional and stressful situation is a way of protecting others and giving them a second chance. This summary of my life is based on my mother’s desire of who I should be and her guidance in building the resilience in me to walk the walk and have the faith in a better tomorrow. Thank you for reading through it, and hope you find it inspirational.

CHAPTER 1

The Village of My Birth, Lekong-Fontem

Lekong is a small village located in the hinterland of the Lebialem division of the southwest region of Cameroon. To the east is Ngundeng in the western region of Cameroon with the nearest city of Dschang about twelve hours walk from Lekong, and to the west by Nveh/Menji is about five hours walk from Lekong. Going to the hospital from Lekong required patients to make this journey to Dschang or to Nveh. In most cases, patients chose to go to Nveh, which requires descending hills 80 percent of the journey. As a result, medical treatment was basically traditional in Lekong as well as other villages far off the lone hospital in Nveh.

At the time of my birth, many children delivered passed away during either childbirth or early in their life because of poor medical conditions and attention, which were mostly traditional as people were not able to afford the cost of treatment at the lone hospital of Mary Health of African Hospital Fontem owned and ran by the Focolare Movement and because patients had to travel long distances to the hospital walking for hours. In many critical cases, patients were transported using bamboos and sticks built into a bed-like structure and carried by strong men in the village. It was one of the community efforts I still admired to this day. Once the call was out, everyone answered present, and the manpower was readily available. It was usually a time of solidarity, and when needed, everyone abandoned whatever they were doing and answered the call. Midwifery was mainly traditional especially if the woman lived far from the hospital or do not have relatives living near or closed to the hospital.

Usually, the journey was between four and six hours and required many men. In my childhood and teenage years, I saw hundreds of these transfers of the sick to the hospital and dead bodies from the hospital to Lekong where I grew up. Transporting those who passed away from the hospital at Nveh to Lekong was a very difficult task because unlike moving the patient to the hospital, which involved descending, moving the corpse from the hospital involved climbing or ascending hills from the hospital to Lekong for six to eight hours. As a teenager, I only participated in two or three of these movements because of my height and age as it was mostly men in their twenties, thirties, and forties. In addition to these tedious journeys, the funeral and mourning took weeks and involved the entire village of Lekong.

My father told me in the days of their youth if a man passed away and his wife was of childbearing age, the woman must remarry in the family often to the senior brother of the diseased or someone more elderly. This, according to my father, was to ensure the bloodline remained the same and that the woman was not left without a man to take care of her and the children. However, at the time of my birth, the practice has been abolished. This is how my father got married to my second stepmother. The death of my father’s brother at a young age forced my father to marry my stepmother, and as tradition demanded, she automatically became our mother as well, just like my father’s second wife.

In the Bangwa tradition and culture during the time of my father, polygamy was the order of the day, and the number of wives and children a man had was a sign of strength, source of labor, and more income to the family as more hands were available to contribute to farming. However, as more and more people began sending their children to school, polygamy began to give way to monogamy as responsibilities toward children increased, and educating children became the pride and priority to the family. Like my father, many men had three to four wives. At the time of my teenage age, polygamy was practiced by less than 1percent of the population. At the moment, the practice of polygamy is no longer acceptable but has not been completely abolished in the Bangwa tradition and some parts of Cameroon.

My mother was the first of my father’s three wives. With many wives and children in the same compound, our days were usually fun at the level of the children but tense when everyone was involved as the division was clearly visible, sometimes promoted by my father’s attitude toward the children and clear discrimination between his wives. My relationship with my mother and the events that were commonplace in our compound greatly shaped my worldview, my relationship with women, and my children. I was the eleventh child borne to my mother and the last but one. However, before I could grow to reason age, six of my mother’s twelve children had died.

In my teenage and adult life, I participated in the burial of three of my siblings from my mother and many more from my stepmothers. In addition, I also buried my mother and my father. My father and his three wives had twenty-three children, and at the time of writing this story, I have eleven siblings from my father still alive. My mother never went to school, but my mother remains one of the smartest people who knew the challenges of life and faith much better than myself. Her beliefs and the positive spirit in difficulties are the greatest gift my mother gave me. My mother always told me two things about life, that success in life is dependent on two things: your personal efforts and your connection to the spiritual world. So my mother always told me about a mighty man who was watching over me from above and the need to know him long before I came to understand the meaning of God’s presence in my life.

My father was a peasant coffee farmer all his life. His coffee farm surrounded our compound, and we cultivated the farm in our teenage years. Like my father, most people in the village live in isolated areas often surrounded by their farmland and everything they owned. The annual output from my father’s coffee farm was between six and nine bags of dried coffee beans in a good year. The income was fluctuating year after year and become worse after the economic liberation by President Paul Biya when private investors took over the buying and selling of cocoa and coffee, and farmers in Cameroon saw their income drop by more than 75 percent. My father responded to this crisis by always telling us there was no money for school fees, books, or even illness.

To me and my siblings from my mother’s house, it was nothing different. My father was the same before the crisis. My mother was the center of our lives, and everything about her children revolved around her. My mother had gradually lost favor with my father as I watched my father shift his attention to my stepmothers and their children because my mother was much older than my stepmothers. My father also felt out with my mother because of her support for her handicapped daughter, my most elderly sister Helen. My father saw Sister Helen as a burden due to her handicapped nature, which prevented her from doing what every woman will do including walking long distances to the farm and carrying huge loads on their backs on their return to the house each day. My father wanted all her girl children to get married, but Sister Helen would need special care from her husband if she got married.

My mother understood the situation, but I think my father did not and was willing to give my sister out no matter what. At that time, culturally, women had little or no influence on how men decided on the fate of their girl children. The situation pulled my parents apart. I watched my mother struggle to gain the attention of my father. My father refused to send his girl children to school, forcing them to get married without regard to their ability to meet the challenges of their time. My father knew that a woman’s survival in the village depended on long distances to farmland, carrying a heavy basket full of cocoyam and walking for two to three hours back to the house. To make money required carrying between 17 kgs and more and walking to another province for sale, a distance of four to five hours. Sister Helen couldn’t meet these village challenges for survival. She depended on our mother for clothes, food, money, and everything a girl child needs.

My father finally forced Sister Helen into a marriage that lasted about fourteen months, and Sister Helen was brought back by her husband who told our father that he was no longer going to be married to a woman whose ability was limited. My father didn’t learn from the event and forced Sister Helen to a second marriage, which ended in six months. For the months Sister Helen was married, I saw my father come closer to my mother. After Sister Helen was brought back by her second husband on charges of her inability to perform domestic duties, this time, I saw my father completely move away from my mother.

My father was hardworking and made sure his sons supported him by allocating portions of the coffee farm each week for manual labor, and not meeting that quarter brought punishments. I tried, but some weeks, I was unable to meet my quarters because I needed to help my mother also. I was my mother’s only son around her. She needed every support I could give her.

My father was not a drunk, but he spent a considerable amount of his small income drinking, income that dropped to less than 120,000 CFA francs per year (about $250). With such little income, the children from my mother were out of the picture, and to ensure it stayed that way, my father needed to keep his distance from my mother. To ensure my mother and myself knew what was going on, my father paid school fees for my other siblings. Mami Fri (short for Frida), my first stepmother, saw an opportunity, as the wall between my mother and father collapsed, to solidify her grip on my father and directed his attention on her and her children. To consolidate her position, she forced my stepsister of late Cecilia to a marriage she objected to and cried for weeks. With Cecilia in marriage, my father up his pressure on Sister Helen to go in for a third marriage. The rift between my father and my sister got worse when Sister Helen got pregnant and refused to name the man responsible for her pregnancy. My father got furious, and there was no peaceful day during her pregnancy and even after the baby girl was delivered.

The evenings in our compound became the time of day I wish never arrived. It was a time of mockery from my father, and he constantly reminded my mother of the bastard child she was supporting. We retracted to our mother’s kitchen during the evenings. It was a moment for my stepmother and her children to spend time with my father in the evening in the living room, which shared a wall with my mother’s kitchen and apartment on the one side and with my stepmother’s kitchen and apartment on the other side. We could hear them talking and laughing as if they wanted to send messages that they were happy and joyful, and I felt the pains of my mother, which were often visibly expressed through her emotions. In these difficult moments, my brother Joseph passed away at age of about twenty-eight, and I saw my mother’s world crumble. Her only support was me and Sister Helen. Joseph graduated from high school a year to his death with excellent grades in math, biology, chemistry, and physics. His death also affected Sister Helen deeply. To her, all hopes were gone, but for me, in primary seven (fifth grade), it was just another loss in addition to those I have been told passed away in their teenage years and as babies.

After the funeral of Joseph, Sister Helen could no longer bear the mockery from my father and decided to run away from home. I remembered Sister Helen telling me to tell our mother that she was going to Muyuka. I was so ignorant of the world outside the village because I have never traveled to any place outside Fontem. I had no idea where or how far Muyuka was from home. Sister Helen left with her children and a small bag, making me think that Muyuka was a village nearby. Our mother went to visit our auntie and was not returning till the next day. When she came back, I told her what Sister Helen said, and our mother shouted to the top of her voice, and my father never said a thing. She broke into tears and lamentation. She asked how she will get to Muyuka with the children, and because I had no idea, I could only imagine with fear.

It was about 6:00 p.m. and late for my mother to go after her. The evening