Deborah Auko Tendo: Triumph after rejection – I was never meant to be born

Deborah Auko Tendo, Fargo’s head of commercial, still weeps for her mother. So many unresolved issues there —pain, abandonment, rejection, bitterness. A broken childhood. She knows a thing or two about going through the wringer: she has lived in a sprawling slum, in a lodging with prostitutes and thugs with guns, and a church, waking up to the toiling of the bell that marked, rather loudly, another blighted day. Her mother remains a thorn in her flesh to date. How do you resolve issues with someone you never knew, someone who is dead?

Well, in no particular order, you drink copiously, you stop drinking, you go to therapy, you get married, you have children, you write a gritty, naked memoir with an oxymoron title, Rough Silk, you climb Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro in one year, “because of that constant confrontation with oneself.” You fight cancer with the one man who never let go of your hand and eventually bury him.

You are suddenly all these things—a wife, a mother, a logistician, a patron of Kenya Women in Logistics and Transport (KWILT), a public and private security analyst, a dangerous goods specialist, a multilingual, a rhumba aficionado with rhythm in her very bones and heart, you are a wanderlust having travelled to 86 countries. You are not just living, you are alive. You survived.

“For me, this International Women’s Day is to celebrate women who survived to tell their story.”

And when you sit down to tell your story, and you go back to the past and your mother, you are suddenly not any of these things, you are a child again. And you can’t stop weeping.

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