Her sonorous voice was the bait that attracted the attention of our correspondent on a sunny Monday morning. She was specific with her noisy request: she needed money to feed her famished children. The kids were right beside their mother, idling away.

Her name is Angela Ekwere, a widow in her mid 40s. She lives and survives in the streets of oil-rich Warri, Warri South Local Government Area of Delta State. Wherever dusk meets her and her kids, there they take cover and continue the peregrination the following day.

She was met taking some short rest in front of a lock-up shop at the popular Okere market with her kids, playing. Her appearance betrayed someone drenched in hunger and privation. Her frail looks, with sunken eyes, said it all.

In a heartwrenching voice, Angela yelled out in desperation and some hope: “Brother, abeg help me; I never eat since morning. Even if na small thing, help me make me and my children fit eat this morning.”

Asking what she was doing under the sun with three adorable children, the widow narrated her story – how she was thrown out of her husband’s house with three children after she lost him to stroke three years ago, and how she has been living from hand to mouth with her children.

Hear her story: “My name is Angela Ekwere. I am in my mid 40s. My father is from Imo State. While My mother is from Okwagbe town in Delta State. Both of them are dead. My husband died some three years ago after suffering from stroke.

“Two years after his burial, his family members threw me and my children out of his house in Owerri, Imo State.

“My husband already had 10 grown up children from two different women before we got married. Shortly after we got married, he fell ill with stroke and I was the one taking care of him.

“In the first year of our marriage, I had my first child for him whom, one of his grown up sons took to Benin to live with him. I had four more children in the following years, but I lost them all.

“After that, I had three more making it eight. So, out of the eight children I have, only four are alive. It was for this reason his grown up children together with his family threw us out of the house we were living with the excuse that they wanted to rent out the house.

“Before my husband died, I was farming, planting cassava for people and helping them weed their farms. I am having pains all over my body, but there is no money for treatment.

“We came to Warri August last year because we no longer had where to stay in Owerri or who to turn to for help. I have step siblings, but I don’t know where they are. My father married more than two wives and my mother gave birth for three different men.

“Since I came to Warri, I have been begging for alms to survive. I wanted to sell sachet water, but any money I get for the day, goes to feeding these three children; so I have not been able to raise the capital for that.

“I don’t even have a house, we normally sleep in people’s shop and leave very early to beg. We normally go to nearby river to bathe since we don’t have where we stay. The children are not in school because there is no money.

“The highest we make daily is N1500. In some days, we hardly make anything from this begging. Sometimes, I go days without eating, but make sure to feed my children with the little we get.

“I can do business, if there is anything anybody wants to help me with, I would like them to give me money to start up small business.

“The country is hard for everybody so even though some people have the mind to give to us, they don’t have anything to give.”