By Cecily Asson Sunday, March 9 2014
BROUGHT
to her knees after losing everything which she believed was most
important and later shocked into reality that life was more than a
husband, a house, a car and academic degrees, Trinidad-born Akosua
Dardaine-Edwards, 39, an internationally known advocate for the
empowerment and development of women has returned home to tell her
story. On Wednesday, she will launch her first book What Did I Learn
Today? Lessons on the Journey to Unconditional Self Love at National
Library and Information System (NALIS) in Port of Spain..
What
Did I Learn Today? Lessons on the Journey to Unconditional Self Love
charts Dardaine-Edwards’s journey from a shy and self conscious child to
a mature, self confident woman through the realisation that
unconditional self love is the key to this transformation.
According to Dardaine-Edwards, the lessons learnt in Northern Uganda where she spent the last 15 months working with women who experienced 27 years of civil war, was enough to make her wake up and accept herself for who she is and show that she is “not the victim of anything.” She only returned home in January. Dardaine-Edwards told Sunday Newsday: “Coming from the western world, going into a situation (northern Uganda) where there is extreme poverty I have never seen before, I personally thought that I was going to be the one to go there and help them and be someone that they come too, to help change things.” It turned out, she said, that “I changed.” The resilience of the women, many of them who were at the time “child soldiers” during the war made her see life from a different perspective, she said.
After 27 years of war, those women found ways to be happy within “their circumstances,” she said. In her book Dardaine-Edwards, an accountant by profession, tells of her childhood years growing up in Simpson Brown Terrace, Cocoyea, her going abroad to study, her failed marriage and the ability to re-discover just who she is.
“I was never planning on writing a book,” Dardaine-Edwards said, “All I was doing at the time was just detailing all my thoughts — just journaling my different journeys of what I have been through in my life...
“The time has definitely come for me to show up as myself.”
According to Dardaine-Edwards, the lessons learnt in Northern Uganda where she spent the last 15 months working with women who experienced 27 years of civil war, was enough to make her wake up and accept herself for who she is and show that she is “not the victim of anything.” She only returned home in January. Dardaine-Edwards told Sunday Newsday: “Coming from the western world, going into a situation (northern Uganda) where there is extreme poverty I have never seen before, I personally thought that I was going to be the one to go there and help them and be someone that they come too, to help change things.” It turned out, she said, that “I changed.” The resilience of the women, many of them who were at the time “child soldiers” during the war made her see life from a different perspective, she said.
After 27 years of war, those women found ways to be happy within “their circumstances,” she said. In her book Dardaine-Edwards, an accountant by profession, tells of her childhood years growing up in Simpson Brown Terrace, Cocoyea, her going abroad to study, her failed marriage and the ability to re-discover just who she is.
“I was never planning on writing a book,” Dardaine-Edwards said, “All I was doing at the time was just detailing all my thoughts — just journaling my different journeys of what I have been through in my life...
“The time has definitely come for me to show up as myself.”
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