Abuse led me to drugs and I sold my son for Sh20,000

Faiza Wanjiru, 36, vividly remembers how her parents quarrelled every other day when she was young. Her mother would receive severe beatings from her father and it never mattered whether the children witnessed the violence. It was torturous for Wanjiru and her nine siblings.

When her mother could not bear it anymore, she quit the marriage and relocated from her matrimonial home in Kirinyaga County to Murang’a.

Wanjiru is the lastborn so she was lucky to move with her mother.  But this marked the beginning of her journey to hell.

Blaming me

“I think my mother developed a mental condition out of the cruelty she had experienced. I don’t know whether she was blaming me for her woes but she was very cruel to me,” she says. “My primary school education was sponsored by a Good Samaritan.”

“I attained 463 marks out of the possible 700 in KCPE in 1997, and was admitted to Alliance Girls High School. But my mother had a shocker for me. She said education was becoming useless owing to joblessness and I was better off getting into more meaningful ventures like seeking employment or getting married. Beyond the choices, she told me I could also choose to die,” she narrates.

She says she was even more shocked when her mother said that she had found a suitor for her who had already given her Sh10,000 as dowry downpayment.

“At age 13, I chose neither option. I ran away from home to Nairobi. I found myself in the streets of Nairobi as an urchin, got pregnant and found someone to buy the baby for Sh20,000,” she says.

Female buyer

She was given Sh10,000 when she was five months pregnant and immediately she delivered on December 6, 1998, she handed the baby to the female buyer and was paid the balance.

But she and the baby buyer were arrested a day later. She found herself at Kirigiti Juvenile jail in Kiambu County for the offence. Then, she escaped after only a week in confinement.

Meanwhile, her baby boy was placed under the care of a guardian.

Wanjiru's mother later traced the baby and took him in 2005. Wanjiru was reunited with the baby the same year, but she could not live with him owing to her lifestyle.

She was using bhang, alcohol, miraa and cigarettes. She was also into shoplifting. One “job” turned awry and she was nearly lynched.

She later graduated to using hard drugs like brown sugar, cocaine and heroin.

As she sank deeper into drugs, she became a con-woman and a robber operating in Nairobi, Kiambu and Narok counties, where she targeted wealthy revellers, spiked their drinks and stole from them.

She was jailed and remanded five times till 2014. By 2015, her daily budget was Sh400 for alcohol, Sh200 for miraa, Sh200 for brown sugar, Sh100 for bhang, Sh100 for cigarettes, Sh80 for buying spiking drugs and Sh20 for food.

“I was such a wreck that I was arrested and placed in the county-managed Mwangi wa Iria Rehabilitation Centre in Murang’a, where withdrawal syndrome attacks were so bad I had to be moved to Mathari Hospital for a year,” she says.

She acknowledges that the counselling sessions at Mathari made her start seeing life positively and she got closer to God. She became a born-again Christian in 2016 before she moved back to the rehab in Murang’a where she gradually put her life together again.

Power in God

“There is power in the name of God because prayers completely drove away my addictions and I was ready to pick up my shattered life. I started preaching in the streets and many addicts reformed,” she says.

It is during of her public rallies against substance abuse that she found people who sponsored her to join Gaitega Polytechnic where she studied short courses in hairdressing and beauty therapy and enrolled in adult education. She is now in Form Three.

Wanjiru, who lives in Murang’a town, urges those in marriages to protect children against abuse.

“I would have lost it completely owing to my parents’ separation that denied me family stability.”

Her parents have since died. But she took back her son, with whom she lives in Murang’a.