Actress Sandra Ababio broke down on The Delay Show when she detailed how her family survived abject poverty, disclosing that she was born into such circumstances.
The famous actress, recalling her childhood, stated that she grew up in impoverished circumstances from the time of her birth. Her family, she said, often struggled to find a place to sleep and had difficulty securing food to eat.
“I was born at Lapaz. Growing up hasn’t been easy,” she said in the interview monitored by GhanaWeb. “We were born into poverty. I came from a family where you wouldn’t even know where your next meal is coming from.”
According to Sandra, her father “was not gainfully employed” while her mother “was a trader”.
“We sold foodstuff, clothes and other things to survive. We moved to Fadama and where to stay was problematic,” she added, recalling how she shared a single room with her parents and three other siblings.
Sandra said they relocated from Lapaz to Fadama, Akweteyman, Taifa, and then to Dome, all in Accra. These new locations came with their own challenges.
“We were ejected from where we lived at Taifa so a friend of my father, now late, who was a pastor accepted us into where his church was,” Sandra recounted. “It was a wooden structure and we slept on the benches.”
As far as she could recall, she was between the ages of five and seven when the relocation happened. As she continued to share the story of how her family struggled, Sandra struggled to maintain her composure as she got emotional.
"Sometimes, when it rained, they would stand and hold my younger siblings because if you slept…," she said, pausing in her narrative as she began to whimper until she found her voice. "Sometimes, they had to stand so we, the children, could lie on the bench."
Beyond not having a suitable place to call home, Sandra said she had no option but to walk to school due to the level of poverty.
“From there, we went to Dome and I was still schooling at Taifa. We walked from Dome to Taifa Burkina to school till I completed,” she said.
After the struggles, Sandra now lives comfortably. She recalled her father getting the opportunity to leave Ghana for the United States of America, and securing a job at XFM marked the beginning of a life-changing experience, although her stay there was quite brief.
At age 26, she traveled to Nigeria for her first movie.
BB
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