By Gab Ejuwa

Mr Joel Anthony Orona-Okuhor was born in 1932. He was intelligent and humble. He was a Roman Catholic from childhood and went through the Roman Catholic Missionary School.

He attended College of Education, Abraka in  then-Bendel State. He was an educationist, a disciplinarian, a leader and teacher, a  mentor, loving, exemplary and a worshiper.

He was the President of Ada Progressive Union, served two terms and the community-made great progress during his tenure.

He dispensed honest advice freely and his words were full of wisdom and truth. He never followed the crowd as he looked at issues from the angle of the persons involved and peculiar facts of the matter.

To the children, he was like some volumes in which lessons were learnt. In fact, there was no day one would encounter him without learning a new lesson and he was a great fighter for the defenceless and the downtrodden, without asking for compensation

He was married to Mrs Juliana Aseromarie Okuhor and they both had six children  (one boy and five girls). He died on the 28th of August 1998.

Madam  Juliana  Orona-Okuhor, otherwise called Onime, Imisi and Madam, was born on the 20th  of  April 1936 to Chief Uziewe Igorigo of the Esaba family in Irri Isoko South of Delta State. Her loving mother, the late Mrs Rebecca Uziewe Igorigo, who married into the family of Mr Oniko of Kennan Irri,  CAN die in 1948, leaving  her at the tender age of 10 to fend for herself.

Madam Juliana attended primary school in Kennan-Irri and bagged the standard 6 certificates in 1956. She began her teaching career at Adiawa in Aboh Local Government area shortly after.

After marriage in 1963, she was transferred to Orrode to join her husband and built a home bubbling with love and laughter. As a matter of fact, the love between her and her husband was legendary and the loyalty unflinching, so much so that their intimacy attracted a generous dosage of envy from their non-Christian kith and kin who however bettered tier own marriages too, borrowing the proverbial leaf from this Christian couple.

Naturally, as educationists and teachers, they trained their children strictly, instilling in them the right values, ethics and mores, thus bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of scriptural truths and precepts, which continued unabatedly even after the passage into greater glory of her loving husband.

A fervent believer in further education, she enrolled into the famous Nana College in 1967 for her teacher’s training certificate, coming out in flying colours in Home Economics and the University of Benin for Advanced Certificate in Education (A.C.E) in 1985.

So eminently outstanding at her preferred course, Home Economics, was she that whenever a governor or any of the other big wigs visited the LGA, she was always the Head Consultant of the catering team, even raising new culinary experts in her immediate community, Irri, whenever there were communal gatherings and celebrations.

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Naturally too, she taught in so many schools that cannot be totally counted because of the contingencies of time and space among which are Abriku Primary school, Owolemu Primary school, Mariere Primary school, Enwreni and Agbeniame Primary school, Oyede, where she retired from the teaching service Commission as Head Mistress in 1991.

In the realm of ecclesiastical accomplishments, supplementary to the aforementioned, Mrs Juliana Aseruomarie played decidedly key roles in the Catholic  Church where she and her ever-supportive husband were accredited leaders, a corollary of which saw her being chosen as one of the delegates deployed to welcome the Pope when he came calling.

Moreover, she was the undisputed and respected women leader in the Catholic churches in the towns and villages where she served during her teaching career and she ensured that all her offspring heed the Christian call, thus functioning as channels of blessing to the nation and indeed the world at large, because her prayers, charitable works and her faith have configured deacons, deaconesses and pastors in Christendom.

Quite interestingly, this “Amazon” of faith was tempted and afflicted by the enemy of our souls, the devil, in accordance with the Christian tradition, sometime in her lifetime, precisely in March 22nd 2004, when she was vacationing in far away from Scotland with her fifth child, Mrs Angela Tanimola. It is ineffaceably on records that the wily tempter smote her with a disease. Nonetheless, her unflinching faith in God and her passionate prayers did miraculously away with this debility and ensured that she saw her grandchildren.

Finally, perhaps by way of a befitting transition to glory, Madam Juliana watched and listened to her ultimate message in less than forty-eight hours transited to glory, leaving her children, Pastor Anne Mejeidu, Dcn.  Arch Ambby Okuhor and others, to mourn and rejoice all in one breath.

Vanguard