HERE WE GO! Hemos enviado un fax al @FCBarcelona_es con nuestra oferta de traspaso: 4 entradas para el concierto de Bad Bunny de maรฑana, una suscripciรณn anual al ABC y una bolsa de pipas. Esperamos ansiosos la respuesta para preparar el โannounceโ.
What is life Anyway? Elizabeth Njoki is 21 years old. She was born and raised in Nakuru by a banker father and a businesswoman mother. Her father built a 12-bedroom mansion and owned two cars while her mother ran a boutique. Life was comfortable until she was 12, when her father was diagnosed with cancer and diabetes. He died a month later.
Two weeks after the burial, her father's two brothers showed up and kicked the family out of their own home. They took the cars and the boutique, claiming everything belonged to their late brother. The family had nowhere to go.
They were taken in by a friend of her mother for two weeks. They then moved to Naivasha where another friend helped her mother find a job to provide for the children. The children went back to school and tried to accept their new reality.
After some time, the mother fell into depression and nearly lost her mind. Together with a friend, Njoki helped take her to Mathare Hospital where she was admitted. With her mother gone, Njoki dropped out of school and started doing casual jobs to buy food for her three siblings.
Her mother eventually got better and was discharged from hospital with help from the area MCA. Despite everything, Njoki managed to score 378 marks in her KCSE and a Good Samaritan paid for her entire secondary education.
But in Form Three, her mother's condition worsened again. She started disappearing for days at a time before returning home. Without her knowledge, some men took advantage of her situation and she came back pregnant. Njoki once again had to leave school and look for casual jobs to keep the family fed. Her mother later gave birth to their fifth child.
When they could not pay rent, the landlord locked them out with all their belongings still inside. A family friend then relocated them to their rural home in Kinangop to live with their grandmother. Things stabilised for a while. The children went back to school and Njoki adapted to a life of casual work because her mother's mental health kept deteriorating.
Their grandmother died in 2024 and they were kicked out of that home too. Njoki used her savings to rent a single room and life went on.
In June last year, Njoki collapsed and was rushed to hospital by a neighbour after she was found bleeding. Doctors discovered she had fibroids in her uterus requiring urgent surgery, or the uterus would have to be removed entirely to stop the bleeding. She could not raise the 80,000 shillings needed for the operation and continued living with the daily bleeding.
She was trying to manage her own condition, care for her mentally unstable mother, provide for the younger children and pay rent all at once. It became too much. The landlord kicked them out again and a neighbour took them in.
Then in August last year, their second born son was involved in an accident and died on the spot. Njoki went to the area chief who helped organise a simple burial within two days at a public cemetery in Longonot. Only a handful of people attended. Their mother was absent.
Njoki scored a B plus in KCSE. She had the grades to build a future for herself. Instead she chose to stay behind and hold her family together. Today she lives on hope alone, trusting that God will find a way through.