My father had a nickname for my mother. He used to call her Yesu, which is the Akan name for Jesus. Akan is the major dialect in Ghana. My father’s reference to her as a Jesus-type figure stemmed from his impression of her as a person with boundless kindness.

I have written frequently about the extreme poverty my family endured when I was a young boy in Ghana. We lived in a tiny village. Both of my parents were illiterate and they had no formal jobs. With no reliable sources of income, feeding me and my thirteen siblings was a constant challenge for them. My mother went to bed hungry many nights because she had nothing left over for herself after dishing out whatever little meal portions she could come up with. Our situation got so desperate after a while that my father had no choice but to leave the family behind to go and live by himself in a remote jungle where he could have access to more fertile land to cultivate crops.

My father might as well have been in a different country at that point. His farm was inaccessible to vehicles so the couple of my siblings and I who visited him during our breaks from school had to walk for miles through dense forest. A little over a year after he relocated, the amount of crops we harvested had increased significantly due to the arability of the new land. Unfortunately, the quantity of produce we could bring home on each visit was quite limited since we had to carry everything in baskets on our heads.

One would think that for someone who went hungry so constantly, my mother would hold on tightly to any foodstuffs we brought back from the farm. What she did instead always confounded everyone at home. On every occasion, mere minutes after we arrived, she would select some of the nicest plantains and other produce from the baskets. She would make several small piles of them and then call some of my siblings to carry them to the neighbors. Everyone in the village was indeed poor, but our family was arguably the most indigent. That made no difference to her.

I certainly wasn’t a fan of her “excessive” generosity. That was the case with all of my other siblings. But none of us could voice any complaints. Being a devout Presbyterian, she had managed to instill the Bible’s teachings in all of us. My sense was that we were all afraid that if we displayed even the slightest hint of annoyance, we would incur the wrath of God. And so we kept silent.

On the few occasions that my father accompanied us back to the village after we visited him, he would also watch my mother’s gifting habit with incredulity. He was not a churchgoing person at the time so in theory, he should have had a bit more courage to speak up. But he also kept quiet. After a while, he started jokingly referring to himself as Satan to draw a contrast with her angelic nature. Whatever subtle messages he was trying to send her never worked.

In those days, eating meat was a luxury that most families in Ghana could not afford. Christmas Day was an exception. No matter how poor a family was, they found a way to provide meat for dinner on that day. In our case, it almost always came in the form of one chicken for the large group we had at home. Again, my mother would always pick out some of the choicest pieces of the cooked chicken, together with some soup, and have us carry them in bowls to our neighbors. The result was that after those donations, there was little meat left for me and some of my siblings. We had to be content with just having soup and whatever scraps of meat remained. We always saw that as a good consolation prize though because the broth tasted a lot better than the fish soups we had the other 364 days of the year.

Now that I am older and wiser, I see the tremendous beauty in all those acts of kindness that I witnessed from my mother during my formative years. Her soul was one of the purest that I have ever been around. I don’t recall ever hearing her say something negative about anyone. She was one of those people who, no matter how bad of a situation they are in, always seem to have the presence of mind to think about the plight of others.

I often hear some Americans talk about the many things they learned from their parents through dinner-table conversations when they were growing up. Sitting down to eat together as a family is an experience I never had in my childhood. It wasn’t part of the culture in most villages in Ghana at the time (that is still the case generally). Even if it were, my family couldn’t have afforded to buy a dinner table anyway. But even without those formal interactions, I managed to acquire a tremendous amount of knowledge by simply observing, quietly, how my mother lived her life. The values I learned from her are countless. Among them are humility, selflessness, and empathy.

Naturally, my mother’s spirit of generosity is the thing that my siblings and I talk about the most whenever we have family gatherings. We did during my recent visit to Ghana. While that is deservedly the most remarkable aspect of her character, for me, there is another one of her qualities that we often overlook. It is her managerial prowess.

When my father left the family to go and live on his farm in that remote jungle, she practically became a single mother. She had to raise five boys and nine girls by herself. As a parent now with just two kids, one boy and one girl, I know how arduous her task must have been. Thinking about it nowadays, I am endlessly amazed by how she was able to run such a tight ship that every single one of her children turned out to be a responsible adult. During a telephone conversation with one of my sisters recently, she wondered about the same thing. She is astonished that in such a large family, there is not a single person who became an alcoholic, a drug user, or engaged in some self-destructive behavior along the way. My illiterate mother didn’t have a high-powered MBA degree, but she was one of the most skilled managers I have ever known.

One of my mother’s most important legacies is the sheer number of highly accomplished nieces and nephews I have. My siblings and I have all used those parental skills we learned from her to nurture our own families. In my quiet moments these days, I often wonder how those two people, with no education and such scant resources, managed to plant such a marvelous tree that is growing so many beautiful branches with each passing year.

In most parts of the world, monetary wealth has always been the yardstick for a person’s social standing. By that measure, I was at the very bottom of the totem pole during my childhood. But I now realize that my siblings and I grew up in one of the wealthiest families on the planet. Money can’t buy a strong character, which is everything in life. I wouldn’t trade those values imparted to us by our two wonderful parents for anything else, no matter how fancy that something might have been.

On this glorious Mother’s Day, I express my sincerest gratitude to the woman who taught me so much about life. My siblings and I, together with our children and their children, have nothing but tremendous respect for her for her graciousness and inner beauty. She must be looking down from wherever she is, smiling, and admiring her gorgeous tree.

Happy Mother’s Day to you, Yesu.