The story of rising model, Jumoke Orisaguna
has been an inspiration to categories of people with little means of
income, especially every tall, model looking bread seller out there,
hanging on the statement that someday
luck might smile on them.
Jumoke is now the owner of a luxury apartment in Lagos with various endorsements from corporate organisations such as Payporte and more recently, Stanbic IBTC.
This has not been the case for her and her family.
The hardship associated with living in poverty is not alien to her as she narrates in an interview with Punch Newspaper.
Speaking concerning her childhood, she said,
“While the other girls would run around to play in the stream and
engage in all sorts of games, I was either selling vegetables for my
mother or helping my father on his farm because it was from these two
areas that our daily bread came,”
“The opportunity for running around like the other girls wasn’t just there.”
She luckily made her way to stardom when she appeared by chance in a Tinie Tempah photo shoot being orchestrated by celebrity photographer, TY Bello.
“I only wanted to
walk through the scene to take bread to my customers at the mechanic
workshop around the place the shoot was taking place. I never had the
intention of appearing in the photograph. It was while I made my way
that the camera captured me,”
She reacted
to the public gaze that followed her after the shoot by saying she was
quite surprised by the way people look at her the next day.
“I was afraid that morning because wherever I turned to, people looked at me unusually,”
“It was
as if I was a wanted criminal that everybody was looking for. One guy
stopped me in the process to tell me that some people were looking for
me and that he saw me on the television and Facebook the previous night.
I simply ignored him because I felt he was crazy. How could I have been
on the television when I didn’t pose in front of any camera, so I
thought. Throughout that day, people told me the same thing in all the
places that I went.
“By the
third day, as I entered one estate where I used to sell to some of my
customers, an Hausa man ran after me immediately he saw me. He said his
madam had been looking for me and that she wanted to help me. That was
how he took me to his madam who happened to be TY Bello. Immediately she
saw me, she welcomed me specially into her home and paid for all the
bread in my tray. She told me it was the end of my hawking bread and
that I was going to have a new life,” she said.
And truly the life of
this young mother of two has changed, as she is now the face of some
top corporate brands with no sign of this coming to an end anytime soon.
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