From a bright star to alcohol, sex-fuelled chaos: Chris Kimaru's near-death experience

Faint in the distance, Chris picked out a sob and a whimper, and then the soft, discreet, shaky reverberations of a voice he had grown accustomed to, saying: “Please make it. Pleeease.”

His partner. His mother. A small crowd gathered around his bed, murmuring amongst themselves, shuffling about uneasily, all struggling with the same question: Why did you do this?  He made a great effort to open his eyes, but when the lids flew open, amid great pain, he could not see anything. A sharp pain sprang from his head and tore, like a pacing tsunami, across his frame. He tried to move his hands, but he could not. They were wrapped in bedsheets and tied against the frames of his bed. He strained to sit upright, but a piercing pain in his nasal cavity held him back. There were pipes driven into his nostrils, and a beep, and a whirr, as machines struggled to keep his organs from collapsing.

“They were ejecting the poison from my system. It was very painful!”

Chris had just survived a suicide attempt. It was a miraculous escape.  Alcohol had led him here. It was going to haunt him for many more years.

Chris, born Chrispus Githae Kimaru in 1983 in Karatina, Nyeri, was a precocious child, cheeky but bright in school, and early on even served as an altar boy in his Kiaruhiu Catholic Church. His childhood was, by all means, normal, devoid of any indications that he would, in his teenage years, discover and get lost in alcohol. He was the second-last child in the family of nine.

Chris was in Form Three at the Kianyaga Boys High School when he, one evening, sneaked out after his brothers and friends, with an intention of tasting muratina. Muratina, a sour-sweet alcoholic beverage popular in his neighbourhood, is fermented from the fruit of the sausage tree and honey. It is so popular that other locally brewed alcoholic beverages are, loosely, christened the same.

“At the time, nearly every boy of my age, or slightly older, was into alcohol. For some, even openly. I decided I was old enough to join them,” he says.

Muratina was readily available. A daily indulgence for his peers, it was easy to access every possible quality of the drink, from the best distilled to the cheapest, least fine. Initially, he was cautious and drank just enough to “feel good”. However, the following year, 2000, all hell broke loose.

With a few friends, Chris found it easy to even pay the brewers in advance for their drinks. He was gradually slipping into addiction, although he was only encountering alcohol during school holidays and mid-term breaks.

In one instance of pure tragicomedy, Chris went out to have fun and drank a bit too much, then staggered out of the tavern and straight into a wedding reception. He collapsed in front of the bridal party.

“When I came to, there was a huge, bearded man giving me some sweet drink, and behind him I could see a theme of white all over, with a smattering of other colours in the décor. I thought I had died and was in heaven,” he laughs.

With his small, unimposing frame and with alcohol dens fraught with altercations, Chris increasingly clung to the feeling that only his continued indulgence in alcohol would make him feel bigger, more masculine, and acceptable among the gatherings of men.

 After he had sat his final secondary school examination, the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE), he drank with great aggression in the period before the results were released. For the first time, he felt adult enough to do it without having to hide.

Road to addiction

“Then the results came. I had scored a B. It was very disappointing because I had always been an intelligent kid.” He chose to drown his sorrows in alcohol. The addiction had officially begun.

At this time, Muratina was largely unsustainable. Without an income, Chris went for cheaper alternatives. All around, dingy liquor shops were peddling sachets of cheap alcohol, and a good number of young people of Chris’s age were seeking solace in these affordable, backstreet options, most of them counterfeits.

In 2002, Chris received his letter of admission to Moi University to pursue a degree in Education (English and Literature). Flung far away from home and now immersed in education, it should have been easy for him to recalibrate and change his life for the better.

But within days of reporting, Chris had discovered every chang’aa and busaa selling joints around his school. He spent his government education loan, disbursed by the Higher Education Loans Board (Helb), and which was meant to sustain him throughout the first semester, within two weeks, drinking every illicitly brewed liquor he could find.

“I called home and asked for money. The money orders were coming and were consistent, and I redeemed them for alcohol as soon as I received them. I was perennially high, and stressed. I read a lot of novels, and getting engrossed in those utopian storylines somehow cured my hangovers,” he says.

Then a flicker of light.

In a moment where he thought he had truly come back to his senses, Chris attended church and gave his life to Christ one Sunday in early 2004, keen to expel the demons of the past several years and ready to re-embrace sobriety.

His journey of purpose lasted just over half a year. Around the seventh month, the storms returned. This time around, he was not only going back to alcohol; he had discovered brothels.

For the next two years, Chris was, a good deal of his time, on the road headed to the capital Nairobi, a distance of about 300kms, to solicit sex.

“I pretty much knew every single brothel, and every drinking den, in town. I frequented Sabina Joy, Eden, Somerset, Rico- name them. It became part of my lifestyle.”

By the time he graduated in 2006, he was neck-deep in a dangerous cross-addiction, juggling alcohol and prostitutes. Shuttling between Eldoret and Nairobi had become an easy thing to do and books, the primary reason he had travelled to Eldoret, were always an afterthought.

Fortune would favour him for, barely a year after graduation, he was hired as a teacher by Wamere Wanene Secondary School in Thogoto, in Kiambu.

Able to make his first earnings since graduating, Chris sunk deeper into alcohol, whiling away his time in some of the neighbourhood’s most famous bars, and oftentimes reporting to school half-drunk. This constantly put him in a collision course with a rather patient administration which, pushed to the wall, gave in a year into his job.

“I went to school one weekend, because we had remedial classes and extra-curricular activities such times, and I was drunk as a fish. There was not much negotiations to happen around that. I was dismissed.”

The year 2008 was a rollercoaster for him. As Kenya was trying to absorb the deadly aftermath of the presidential election of 2007, Chris was darting from one job to the other, barely carrying lessons from the last to the new one. Even after the unceremonious dismissal from Wamere Wanene, he got hired at St. Mary’s School in Donholm.

At around this time, he was transitioning into a full-blown alcoholic, and despite the warnings of a job loss when he started turning up to work drunk, he disappeared into alcohol dens for days.

“The students would find me drinking. Or drunk. I remember one time I was moving between the bar and school and never getting to my house, and for a while, I was not even having a change of clothes. It became untenable for the school, and I was fired,” he says.

Behind the notorious drunkard, however, was a ruthlessly ambitious spirit that saw him make applications in pursuit of lofty opportunities in big companies, and shortly after his dismissal from St. Mary’s School, he got a letter inviting him to an interview for a job he had applied for at Safaricom.

“There were over 1,000 of us who had applied and were vetted for the positions of Customer Care Representatives. Only 12 were needed.” Favoured by fate, Chris was among the successful ones.

More money, more trouble

The problem, for him, had intensified. He started working in August of 2008, and when the first salary came in October, it was the largest payment of his life. That, coupled with the offer of a good cell phone, airtime, and performance bonuses, led him to more alcohol and more frequent visits to some of the city’s seedy hangout joints.

Within no time, he was missing work as he wished. Sometimes, he skipped work four or five times a month. At such times, he walked into hospitals and picked up reports to help apply for sick leaves at work. It helped that he worked night shifts, and it was not always possible for supervisors to notice that he was not at work.

“I was given warnings twice, and even offered counselling. But the money was coming in fast, and there was no way to leave my drinking,” he says.

Pipeline, crowded and known for rampant insecurity and poor sanitation in large parts of the settlement, did it for him. It was the consummate hideout.

Chris was issued numerous warnings, each of which he ignored. He went on with his debauchery unperturbed by the risk his life posed to his job. In one of the extreme cases of recklessness, he skipped work for 16 consecutive days. And then he stopped going to work altogether. 

Safaricom, pushed to the wall, sought him in one last attempt to help him salvage his job. When they were unable to, they reached out to Angela Kimaru, one of Chris’ younger sisters, and handed her his dismissal letter.

“They looked for him everywhere and came to me as the next of kin. It was a painful letter for me to take home. He is my favourite sibling,” she says.

Angela immediately went to Pipeline, as she knew where he lived. She did not find him.  

Safaricom then deposited Chris’ three months’ salary, which would become torturous for him again.

He drank it all. 

In one of the scariest incidents he remembers, Chris one day went to the pub and drank late into the night until he had blacked out. When he shook back to consciousness, he lay outside, and in the distance he could hear honking and the incessant sounds of engines as cars sped past, almost as if he were on a roadside. He sat up and took in his surroundings. He was seated in the middle of a roundabout, with neat skyscrapers visible across the road, posh cars wheeling past.

This was not Embakasi.

Chris approached a guard outside one of the buildings and enquired where he was. Magically, he had found his way to Westlands, a distance of about 14 kilometres, without his knowledge.

Shaken, he asked where Chiromo Hospital Group was, because he had heard there was a rehabilitation centre there, and also because he knew that it should have been a short distance away from Westlands. He was directed there.

It was early morning, and so he prodded towards Chiromo, about 500m away from the roundabout. When he got there, however, he got into the facility through the mortuary side.

“I found some of the guards at the mortuary and told them, ‘Hey, I am your client.’ They made fun of it, you know, then seeing I was not looking very good, directed me to the hospital side.”

Chiromo Hospital Group provides care to individuals facing mental health challenges. There, Chris found the consultant psychiatrist on duty, but lacking identification, a close contact had to be called before he could be attended to.

Chris gave his sister, Catherine, a number.  And Catherine, who lived in Ruai, rushed to the hospital, paid the fee for his treatment, and committed to taking care of him when he left the hospital. 

Catherine Njeri Kimaru is the firstborn of the family. Then working at Consol Glass, now Ardagh Glass Packaging- Africa, in quality control, she knew that she had full responsibility over Chris, now that their ageing parents were far away in the countryside in Karatina, about 130 km away.

“I was always very worried about him. I am Catholic, and I  always prayed he be restored to his true self, the brilliant, talented Chris we had known in his childhood,” she says.

Moments were tense whenever Chris was inaccessible, and when she got a call from Chiromo, with the caller asking if she knew anyone by his name, she thought he could have landed in grave danger, or he could be critically ill. Worse, brought to the mortuary.

“I almost collapsed,” she says. “When I rushed there, I found him lying prostrate on the grass, still half sober. He was excited to see me, and I was relieved he was alive.”

Catherine says that post-recovery, Chris seemed to have regained energy to get even deeper into alcohol. And he admits it.

“In essence, all this time I just wanted someone to house and feed me. I do not think I was ready to rehabilitate.”

Within those two months, he had looked for drinking places around his sister’s house and started stealing from her. And so, after staying with her for nearly three months, she kicked him out. 

Jobless

In 2011, five years after he had graduated from college, Chris was without a job, scrounging for scraps and drinking himself soggy. He had tasted money and lack, and it seemed he had settled for the latter, for it came with the freedom to move about as he desired and to do whatever he desired.

But he had to drink, and so he started selling his few household items to finance his habit. One day, he hawked away his TV at half the price and did not even collect the full payment that the lucky buyer offered. Anything to quickly take away his sobriety and to afford him the cheap thrills of the backyard brothels was hugely welcome.

When he had sold nearly everything, including his shoes, at his Pipeline house, James Macharia, a university roommate, dragged him out and into a house in Kariobangi South, a low-income residential and commercial area across Embakasi. Chris entered a poky, little rooftop house which had been a store, in the same apartment block as James.

“At the time, online writing was a new thing, and I introduced him to it. He caught up fast and was soon making some money,” James says.

Exposed to earning, once more, Chris embraced the bottle a little too hard, until what he was making could not afford his drink.

And then, from the frying pan into the fire: he was robbed, right inside his house.

One evening, he walked a call girl, one of his most frequent contacts, into the house, seeking a happy night. When he got up in the morning, however, with a foggy eyesight and memory, and a sharp, splitting pain in his head, she was gone, as was his laptop, and many of his belongings. He had been drugged.

It was finally time to let Chris go, as the landlord had for days complained about his drinking and recklessness. And as Chris had grown accustomed to stealing from his benefactor, James, he was soon kicked out of the house and went back to the streets.

While languishing in the cold, a friend he had made in the drinking dens, and who he only remembers as Kamau, offered him accommodation. Struggling, the two would often get locked out of the house for lack of rent.

He was not to stay with Kamau for long.  One day, he stole Kamau’s phone, hoping to sell it to make some money for alcohol. Kamau, quick to notice his phone was missing and suspecting it could have been with Chris, confronted him.  

“I denied it, and then the phone rang in my underwear.”

Embarrassed, Chris bolted.

Without a house to sleep in, Chris cleaned bars, was paid with alcohol, and slept in those same bars. He was drinking from the grimy bars of Korogocho, one of the biggest slum sprawls in Nairobi.  At this point, he had given up all hope of living, and he entertained the idea that he might die by suicide.

 It was at this point that Chris’ mother sent one of his brothers, Samuel, to come look for him and take him back home to Karatina. Having cut nearly all contact with his parents at home for years, Chris had snuck from place to place, hoping his parents never got wind of his actions and his whereabouts.

Back home, they were desperate to see him again and to closely monitor him amid rumours of his wanton drunkenness, petty theft, and perennial homelessness.

“My brother came and told me that he wanted to help me pack my belongings so we could transport them home. But I did not have any belongings at all. He could not believe it. We went to Karatina with nothing.”

When they got home and opened the gate, Chris’ father saw him and turned away. His mother started crying. Their child had been wasting away in the city and looked badly emaciated, haggard, and sleep-deprived.