My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother, Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year, on Christmas.

Weah is recalling an upbringing marked by early loss and material scarcity: his father’s death, being brought up by his grandmother, and the detail that chicken was a once‑a‑year Christmas meal. The specificity of the food memory functions as a concrete measure of poverty rather than an abstract claim, underscoring how exceptional even small luxuries were. In the arc of Weah’s public story—rising from a poor Monrovia neighborhood to global football fame and later Liberia’s presidency—the quote frames his achievements as emerging from deprivation and family resilience, and it implicitly credits his grandmother’s care as foundational to his survival and ambition.