Some dreams take longer to bloom, but when they do, they flourish beyond anyone’s expectations.
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When Adwoa left secondary school, university wasn’t even on the table.
She had passed her exams, yes, but life had other plans. Marriage. Children. A home to build and mouths to feed. While her classmates moved on to lecture halls and group assignments, Adwoa was changing diapers and managing a household.
For years, she poured everything into her family. She didn’t regret it, not really, but sometimes, late at night, she would stare at her old notebooks and wonder what it would’ve been like to become the engineer she once dreamed of being.
Then, on her 33rd birthday, something shifted.
Her daughter asked her, “Mummy, what did you want to be when you were my age?”
Adwoa paused.
“A mining engineer,” she said softly.
Her daughter smiled and said, “So why don’t you be one now?”
It sounded simple. It wasn’t.
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At 34, Adwoa stepped into a university lecture hall again. Her books felt heavier. Her mind, rustier. The other students whispered, laughed, and stared.
They called her “Madam” and “Aunty.” To the Gen Z’s, she was a geriatric. She didn’t fit in with the younger ones, they were fast, tech-savvy, always speaking in acronyms. And with the lecturers and older staff, she felt invisible, too old to be a student, too new to be taken seriously.
But Adwoa stayed.
She studied while her kids did their homework. She pulled all-nighters fueled by instant coffee and pure willpower. She failed one exam and cried in the bathroom, then went right back and passed the resit.
Four years later, she graduated. The loudest cheer at her ceremony came from her teenage son, who screamed, “That’s my mum!”
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Her first job as a junior engineer wasn’t easy.
The younger graduates didn’t include her in conversations. The senior team thought she was too soft. Her age became a joke, “Let’s give the report to Grandma, she has all the experience from 1980,” someone once said during a meeting.
Adwoa laughed it off. Until one day, she didn’t.
After a rough shift and a particularly nasty comment about her being “wasted potential,” she went home, stared at her reflection, and asked herself:
“Is this what I came back for?”
The next morning, she handed in her resignation.
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With her savings, a small loan, and support from two fellow women engineers, Adwoa started her own mining support company: TrueGrit Services.
The beginning was hard. Contracts didn’t come. Equipment broke down. Staff left. She almost gave up, more than once.
But she pushed through.
She focused on what others ignored: training junior workers properly, treating field staff with dignity, showing up on-site herself — helmet on, boots dusty, hands steady. She built slowly, one honest contract at a time.
By her 42nd birthday, TrueGrit had grown from one pickup truck to a fleet of ten. They supplied safety gear, provided technical training, and managed crew deployments across several mining sites.
By 45, Adwoa’s company was one of the most respected mining support service providers in the country. Her name became known, not because she was loud, but because she was reliable.
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At a mining conference years later, a young female engineer approached her and said, “My mum showed me your story when I wanted to give up. You made me believe it’s not too late to start.”
Adwoa smiled. “It never is.”
She never went back to that company that once mocked her. She didn’t need to. They now bid for contracts from her.
And every year, on her birthday, she remembers the question that changed her life.
“What did you want to be when you were my age?”
She answers it now with quiet pride:
“Exactly what I am.”
