Blessing Tarfa

Blessing Tarfa is an educationist and a writer. She is a Shaper with the Abuja Global Shapers Community of the World Economic Forum, a Kashim Ibrahim Fellow and a fellow from the Legislative Mentorship Initiative. As an education research consultant, Blessing develops tools to support policy implementation and education continuity in conflict situations. Blessing has judged writing competitions including the Corona Management Systems Writing Prize for International Women’s Day 2023, the Hamza El-Rufai Short Story and the Professor Andrew Nok Poetry Prizes in 2023. She is the winner of the Hafsat Abdulwaheed Short Story Prize 2022 and the Wakini Kuria Children’s Literature Prize for 2020. Her non-fiction piece “Mutu: Something Strange in Adamawa” also featured in the maiden edition of Za! Magazine. Blessing enjoys reading and teaching.
Flight

Their story ends at the point where the woman sobs uncontrollably at the airport while being held by her mother. I want to tell them she is not her mother. I want to tell them how their story will never carry the weight of this loss. I want to tell them how this loss will continue to live for as long as her life goes on. The loss will be in the next family picture they take and the first time she explains to her daughter what happened to Rex. For the rest of her life, she will have to split herself into two parents and complete conversations with his ghost, telling her daughter how he would have been proud of her.

May 21, 2024