A mothers Journey through Entrepreneurship (Part 1)
20 years ago, I made a life-altering decision.…
I decided I would start my own business. I would become my own man—or is it woman? 😊
Starting a company wasn’t the hardest part. The real battle was everything happening around me.
I had just walked out of an extremely toxic and abusive relationship. I had also walked out of my job on a farm in Nyeri, the company owner, the best employer I have ever had, yet. You don’t walk away from something unless it’s bad.
My ex—well, he was a good human being in some ways, but he had a lot of work to do on himself.
As for my job, great as it was, I was too embarrassed to stay. Our relationship drama had spilled into the workplace. It was no longer whispers and gossip—it was more like the Kardashians, raw and unpaid. In an attempt to control me, my ex went as far as reporting me to our senior HR at head office.
The humiliation still stings when I recall that moment. The HR—someone I had genuinely looked up to—called me and asked, “What kind of man are you married to?” It hits down deep when someone like that questions your capability of making life choices. She wasn’t even aware of the fact that we weren’t even married!
In the following few weeks, I resigned. I used a cock-and-bull story to explain my departure.
Months before, I had been offered a job at one of the oldest Kenya-based certification bodies, with a salary of 70,000 Ksh. Looking back, it was a good offer, but at the time, I was terrified of Nairobi life. All the stories I’d heard about the city haunted me, and I couldn’t bring myself to take the risk.
So, I stayed in Nyeri, continuing to earn my 50,000 Ksh. The job came with free housing, transport, and plenty of fresh vegetables from the farm. They say comfort is the enemy of progress—a lesson I was destined to learn later in life.
Later, I would move to Nairobi with no job. With recommendations, I joined a consulting company. They implemented food safety standards. I had come to master and love these standards in my previous work. The pay was 2,500 KSh per day, and the work wasn’t daily. That was my initiation into Nairobi life.
Sometimes I wished I had taken that other job. But as they say, yaliyomwagika hayazoleki (spilled milk cannot be gathered back).
By the third month, I realized something: I could do this myself. I could set up my own consulting company.
And so, the journey to form Farm to Fork began (www.farmtoforkltd.co.ke) . At that time, the concept was little known in the industry. My younger brother is an agricultural engineer. My former boss and He both graciously believed in my idea. We registered the company together.
But the dream was terminated nastily.
My ex abducted our 4-year-old daughter.
It would take months before I would find my baby. He threatened to kill her and then kill himself. “I will throw her in the river and then jump in myself,” he said.
I believed him. No one else did.
But that didn’t stop me from giving up everything in pursuit of my child.
I closed the office, and without me, the lead expert, the rest gave up. We lost all the money we had invested. I took a bus and began hanging around western Kenya. I waited, hoped, and searched there because that’s where I had learned my baby was.
That was at the end of my life as I knew it, the idea of starting a business was pushed far, far back—buried deep in the corners of my mind. Because after a hard fall, the pain cuts deep, leaving wounds that can echo for a lifetime if left unchecked.
Would the scars of my failure ever heal? Only time could tell.
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Also read: https://carolinebongo.com/blog/understanding-true-success-beyond-money-and-ambition/
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