Every morning, Rev. Chaplain Gbamwuan Samuel Teryima walks to a six-foot blackboard in a secondary school classroom in Gboko, Nigeria, and begins the quiet negotiation that has defined his entire life.
He was born without fingers. Without toes on one leg. Into a peasant farming family of fifteen children in rural Benue State, where survival is already hard enough for those the world considers whole.
And yet, the man who stands before that blackboard today does not stand there despite what he lacks.
He stands there because of what he chose.
“Life Is Not a Race Between Hands”
Samuel is the seventh child of his parents. When he arrived, nobody in the household had answers. Only a mother who looked at her newborn son and said, simply, “We would see.”
And she saw.
She refused to make Samuel the centre of pity. When water needed to be fetched, he fetched it. When chores needed doing, he did them. When he came to her one afternoon, frustrated by how slowly a simple task was taking, she sat with him and spoke words that would travel with him for the rest of his life:
“Life is not a race between hands.”
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He did not fully understand it then. He does now.
His father, a man of few words and relentless consistency, taught him something different. That has remained equally permanent. One day, young Samuel had been carrying water with his brothers. The journey was long. The weight felt crushing. He set the container down beneath a tree and sat, wanting to stop.
His father walked over, sat beside him, and after a long silence said: “Rest if you must. But do not build a house there.”
Samuel picked up the container and kept walking.
He has been walking ever since.
The Boy Who Learned to Write With No Fingers
When Samuel entered St. Peter’s Primary School in Mkar, the question was entirely practical: how does a child without fingers hold a piece of chalk?
Nobody answered with theory. They answered with patience, his teachers, and more importantly, himself. He tried. The chalk fell. He tried again. Children stared. Some laughed. Some encouraged. Some asked the honest, cutting questions that children ask when adults would have looked away.
He stopped focusing on the audience. The task mattered more than the attention.
Slowly, writing became possible. Then functional. Then, quietly, stubbornly, without any single dramatic breakthrough, precise. He got it right!
The Classroom That Changes Everything
Today, Samuel’s students at Penworth Secondary School are asked to do one thing above all else: think.
He does not accept “I don’t know” as the end of a conversation. When a student once gave that answer, shrinking at the back of the classroom, Samuel simply nodded and said, “Good. Now we know where to start.” Then he spent the next several minutes helping that student discover the answer himself — not giving it, but guiding — until the boy realized he was capable of more than he believed.
That is the lesson Samuel has been teaching his entire life, just in different classrooms.
Students who enter his room expecting to stare forget to. Within minutes, the lesson consumes them. One former student remembers spending her first few weeks unable to stop looking at him, and then one day realising she hadn’t thought about it in weeks, because all that mattered was that he expected her to think.
Samuel holds a Bachelor of Education with Second Class Upper Honours from the University of Calabar and a Master’s degree in Educational Management from Benue State University. He earned those degrees not as proof of something, but as a continuation of something, the same discipline his parents planted in him on dirt roads and long walks home with heavy water containers.
The Football Field, the Loss, and the Life Still Being Lived
On certain evenings, Samuel walks to a football field where children and young men gather. Something changes in him there. His posture loosens. The air lightens.
Without arms for conventional balance, he has learned to play with timing, anticipation, and trust. He receives the ball, controls it, and redirects it with movements that are practiced, not performed. When a challenge arrives too late, he laughs and tells his opponent they are slow.
Football, he says, taught him that life is about timing, knowing when to move, when to wait, and when to trust someone else. The ball responds only to what you actually do. There is no room for excuses on a pitch, and he finds profound wisdom in that.
But life has not only given Samuel lessons. It has also given him grief.
He is the father of three daughters, namely: Patience, Deborah, and Bethany, These females, he says with a soft smile, keep him honest. Students see him as an authority. His daughters know when he is tired, when he is worried, when he has forgotten where he put something.
Last February, his wife passed away.
He speaks about her carefully, the way you speak about something still close to an open wound. She had a way, he says, of making ordinary days feel complete. Most of life is ordinary – ordinary meals, ordinary mornings, ordinary conversations – and she made those spaces warm. After she was gone, he learned how much of a home can exist inside one single person.
That absence, he says, becomes quieter with time. But it never disappears.
The Biggest Misunderstanding
As a chaplain, Samuel’s congregation often notices something about the way he speaks about suffering. He does not position himself outside of it. He does not preach like a man who escaped.
He preaches like a man who is still inside life, still walking through it, still carrying something heavy, and still moving.
For years, people have looked at Samuel Teryima and seen what is missing: the fingers he was never born with, the loss he has endured, the obstacles that should, by conventional logic, have defined and diminished him.
He sees it differently.
“The biggest misunderstanding people have about me,” he says, “is that my life has been defined by what I lack. It has actually been defined by what I chose to do with what remained.”
“You Do Not Rush Geography”
The school day is ending now. Students close their notebooks. Evening light stretches across the classroom floor. Samuel stands before the blackboard, studying the globe he drew that morning, lines of latitude, meridians, the careful curve of a sphere, before slowly erasing it.
He has spent years teaching geography: maps, boundaries, locations, directions.
But when asked what he is most proud of, the answer arrives without hesitation.
“That I did not allow bitterness to become my identity.”
He pauses. “Life gives every person reasons to become bitter. I had mine. But bitterness is a prison that disguises itself as protection. I chose another path.”
The last student drifts out through the door. Samuel glances toward it and smiles. Before he leaves, he offers one final thought — the kind that lands softly and stays permanently:
“You do not rush geography,” he says. “You understand where things are.”
The chalkboard stands six feet tall. It has not changed.
The man standing before it has — and that, it turns out, was always the only thing that needed to.
Samuel Teryima teaches Social Studies at Penworth Secondary School in Gboko South, Benue State, Nigeria, where he has served students and quietly served as proof of what human beings are capable of, for over two decades.
