‘A long overdue reunion’
How three women, strangers, changed my life
Nearly a decade after three American women helped make it possible for her to go to college, Kenyan journalism fellow Mercy Adhiambo met with them in Oklahoma.
The smell of frying fish often lifts me and places me in the heart of Western Kenya, Kisumu County, where I was born and raised by a woman who sold fish. My mama, Achieng Otieno, bought tilapia from fishermen who docked their boats on the shore of Lake Victoria at 4 a.m. every day. When the world was still consumed in darkness, my mama would head to the lake, get her fish, split them open and hang them in preparation for frying.
Every day, I saw her walk up, down, then up again, on the sloppy terrain that led to the lake — with a huge basin of fish on her head. Over and over, until every part of her body reeked of fish. Sometimes, during the rainy season, my mama would slide and fall when the path became slippery and made it almost impossible for her to balance the heavy load and walk in steady steps. But she did it earnestly, without complaining. Since Mama would be at the market most days, whenever people came looking for her, I bore the responsibility of describing them to Mama until she could figure out who they were.
Back then, before cellphones flooded the market, I was her living voicemail machine. I absorbed every message and details and delivered them to her when she returned home.
“Did she have a gap between her teeth? How did he walk? A bounce as if he has a shorter left foot? Did he have a stutter in speech? Did she look like someone who has had children?” Mama would often ask.
By the time I was about 10 years old, I had mastered the art of description. My brain had become a sponge that could retain things that were beyond my age.
Even when guests came while we were waiting for Mama to return with paraffin to light the house, and I couldn’t see their faces, I learned to take in details. My childhood prepared me for description. Enter adulthood, and I got into journalism. In our news desk in Kenya, my job is to “treat ailing stories” and watch them bounce to life.
My role is to pick up my tools, which really are always just pen and paper, go to the scene and describe in detail what is happening.
When a CEO in my country runs over a poor night watchman after a night of drunken escapades and people are speaking about it in hushed tones, I go hunting to bring back the details.
I go to the scene, talk about how the brother of the deceased sat alone in the iron sheet shanty they lived in, trying to collect the remnants of life.
I tell how I watched a man break down and throw himself on the dusty floor he once shared with his only brother, who is now abandoned in the morgue because of a collapsing justice system whose arm is too short to poke the rich.
When a man wins the jackpot and becomes a woman magnet and an overnight sensation, I am the one assigned to go and describe every little detail, including his new designer clothes that hang conspicuously on his lean frame.
I tell stories of people. In detail. I weave the narratives tightly in strong yarn of carefully chosen consonants and vowels, in the hope that they will make more sense. I speak life into dead alphabets and watch them spring up, even though sometimes I fail miserably at it.
I polish rusting tales and attempt to make them sparkle. I have crawled the underbelly of parts of this world to seek tales in war-torn areas and pen a narrative.
Yet there is one story that I have never been able to tell. I cannot find the right words to tell MY story. I have told fragments of things that made me who I am today. However, for almost 10 years, I have sought the right adjectives, nouns, verbs and vocabulary to tell this one story.
But anytime I sit to write it, words are deficient.
Sometimes I say to myself: “I wonder if people will get it.”
I feel this is one of the stories that should be told when the skyline is colored with fireworks. It is a story that lies deep in my heart, and sometimes I feel like I need to hush the whole world and command them to sit still and listen.
It should be told through talking drums, to provide a rhythm. It is a story that should be arranged in song and harmonized in an orchestra.
It should be captured and locked in legend, then told under embers of sparkling fire after people have eaten their fill — because it is a story of transformation. My transformation. I have typed, deleted, typed, deleted — for almost 10 years, because I didn’t feel like I am capturing it whole.
Today I type it again in an attempt, and I hope it makes sense.
Nine years ago, I was 19 years old and desperately seeking education. I had just cleared high school, and my mama could not raise the money needed to pay for my college.
For two years, I walked all over, wrote many letters to the government, hoping someone would someday find me and pay for my college.
Nobody did.
Looking back, I recall the feeling of hopelessness that I woke up with when days turned into years, yet there was no sign that I would ever go to college.
I was working in a cyber cafe where the only payment I got was being allowed to touch and play with computers after the clients had left.
My obsession with the written word pushed me to reading and writing things for cyberspace, hoping that someone out there would sift through the billions of contents floating online and recognize me.
It was a long shot. It took years, sweat and holding on when it felt that everything else was not falling into place.
My large folder of rejection letters is proof of the journey I walked to get a college education. I came so close to giving up.
Then something happened that not only transformed my story but also changed the entire course of my life. It brought a new arc, a beautiful dimension. And it has become the main anchor of the story that tells who I am.
In 2007, while traversing the World Wide Web, I bumped into a writing contest called the “Glass Woman Prize.” It was an annual online writing contest hosted by an American woman, Beate Sigriddaughter, that drew hundreds of writers from all over the world.
I submitted my story, but I didn’t win. It was shortlisted as one of the top contenders.
But that was not the end of it. Everything else unfolded from it in a way that I cannot describe without falling on my knees and weeping ’till I lose my breath.
When my story wasn’t chosen, Kim Robinson from Minnesota — who coincidentally had read it — wrote to Beate to say she enjoyed it.
When Beate forwarded me the email from Kim, it gave me a sense of validation, which I needed at that point. After getting so many rejection letters, just a note from a stranger in a faraway land saying “I read you” can give you a boost.
That correspondence started the alteration of my destiny. Apart from Kim telling me she read my story, she also asked me who I was.
A stranger, a woman in America, asking me — the daughter of a fishmonger in the depths of Kisumu — what I am all about changed my life.
“Tell me about you,” she wrote in her email.
That statement changed my whole story.
We wrote back and forth. Everyday. And suddenly, I started feeling a return of the one thing that was beginning to leave me. I started feeling hope again. I told her of my interrupted dreams, of the things I wanted to do and those that I was too scared to conceive.
Things that seemed impossible — like going to college. One stranger to another. Talking online. About dreams.
Then one day, she wrote to me saying: “I have been telling people your story, and someone has volunteered to pay for your college.”
A stranger. Online. Had offered to pay for me to go to journalism school.
Really, there is no description to describe it further than that.
No matter how trained you are in description, you cannot possibly type out the feeling that engulfs you when someone you have never met, or had a personal conversation with, writes to you saying she is willing to invest in you.
I can’t adequately describe the warm feeling in the pit of my stomach as I read the email and wondered if it was a hoax. Or how I ran home like a maniac and told my mama who sells fish: “I am going to college …!” And she looked at me confused and asked: “Who is paying?”
And I said: “Mama, someone I met online … through a story I wrote.”
I can’t find words to describe the confusion on her face. I am lost.
Or maybe the story lies on how I broke down later that night and cried until I shook, saying to myself, “This better be true, Lord!”
It was true. I later learned that Deb Sauter, an educator working with Kim in Duluth, Minn., had heard about me and decided to pay for me to go to college.
Initially, Kim and Deb started a fundraising effort at their school. It was amazing, seeing little people who had never met me, putting their pennies on my future. I got letters from students rooting for me and hoping that I made it to college.
But they realized that effort was not sustainable, and that’s where Deb took over.
And that is how I managed to go to journalism school.
Let me put it like this: I come from a society where women have to fight to get education. I struggled to get attention in my own country, because in my country, we women are a cycle of nothingness who should be pushed into the periphery.
We are not supposed to be educated.
We are equated to zero, because in so many settings, nothing good can ever come out of a woman. We are supposed to wake up each day and labor until we die.
Then women, miles and miles away, gave me a chance.
What are the odds that a random girl child in Kisumu gets noticed by a group of women who had to look up where exactly Kisumu is in the globe, yet they were willing to put their money on me?
I could write on and on about the reinforced belief in humanity. That, despite all the negative stories that seep through the news, there is still plenty goodness in the world.
I am built, block by block, by a story about women who believed in me and gave me a chance.
Almost 10 years after we started our communication, I met all of them for the first time here in Oklahoma City, where fate brought me to them through a journalism fellowship.
All of them came to meet me. It was a long overdue reunion. Of women who gave my life a new definition.
I shiver when I think how things unfolded. I am scared of what I would have ended up being, had a stranger not asked me who I am.