A life almost lost: How an alcoholic turned addiction into a healing career

Two weeks after Chris Kimaru’s mother sent his brother, Samuel, to find him and bring him home to Karatina, his parents secured him a job at a cybercafé in Karatina town.

James also sent him a desktop computer to help him re-establish his writing career. sktop to help him reestablish his writing.

“James has always been a very kind person. He had seen me suffer with my alcoholism, hitting rock bottom every so often. I had even stolen from him, but he was happy to help,” says Chris.

James says he was hopeful his friend would soon overcome his addiction.

This new display of kindness did not do Chris much good, however.

He started drinking again. And suddenly he stopped going back home in the evening, choosing to, instead, drink the money, Sh50, meant for his fare.

He slept outside: in the verandahs of the town’s pub, beside abandoned cars and under parked trucks, and next to night guards.

Towards the end of 2012, the Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC) advertised jobs for teachers. Chris applied and was shortlisted for interviews. During the vetting process, where he had to photocopy documents, travel to deliver them and to attend physical interviews, Chris impressed on his parents to keep giving him money for uses he exaggerated, in instances lying that he was needed to deposit this amount here and that there, and when he could not convince them anymore, he went on to do the same to his extended family, and to his friends, so on and so forth until there was no one left to con.

He drank all the money he received during this time.

Five years after his last teaching job, Chris got a job as a teacher of English at Magutu Girls’ High School, a county girls' boarding school located in Karatina, Nyeri County.

Among those who welcomed him was Peterson Karue, a teacher at the school.

“Brilliant man, brilliant teacher,” says Peterson. “At first, he was doing very well, until the salary came.”

In the first three months, as is the norm with the TSC, he did not receive a salary.

“I had started dating and living with a teacher at the school. I used to steal from her, and so I could still afford my drinking.”

For some reason, she tolerated him. Then the TSC released his three-month salary, and it was well over Sh100, 000. He courted alcohol and, in a fortnight, the money was all gone.

“When the money came, he vanished for days,” Peterson says. “He would then reappear, broke. He even failed to pay his rent and was kicked out of his house.”

With three pay slips, Chris took numerous loans from microfinances. He was soon in serious debt.

Then he devised a clever way to obtain money: his students.

Chris convinced girls to lend him money, which he would refund at the end of the school term. In many instances, when a girl was caught in wrongdoing, he asked her for money to commute her punishment.

When the end of the term came, and girls came looking for him, Chris disappeared. Tens of girls were left stranded, without fare back home, or pocket money for crucial necessities.

“We were left settling his debts with the students,” Peterson, who has since transferred to another school within the same county, says.

Chris got his first warning letter that year. “Coupled with the fact that I was sometimes a no-show in school during normal times, the TSC asked me to show cause why I should not be fired. I, somehow, survived,” he says.

Suicide mission

At the start of 2014, his partner got pregnant. This development quickly exacerbated his desire to die by suicide, and by Valentine’s Day, he had a plan drawn up. One day, his partner left for school, and Chris set about selling their household items. He found a buyer for the TV, which he sold for Sh6,000, and then rushed out of the house.

Chris went to an agrovet and bought a sachet of Marathon 1% G, a highly-active insecticide known for the quick elimination of aphids, whiteflies, fungus gnats, mealybugs, and thrips. He then proceeded to the shopping centre and entered a pub, buying his friends alcohol freely, then went to a second pub and bought a few friends beers.

He then whipped out his phone and wrote a text to his partner and to his fellow teachers: ‘I am done.’

He walked to a toilet within the facility, forced the locked door open, and, once inside, ingested the insecticide.

It was at Jamii Hospital, in Karatina, that he came to, amid distant wailing and praying. He opened his eyes, but everything was pitch dark. He had lost his sight, and pipes were running into him to eject the poison he had ingested.

“I could hear my partner sobbing. I heard my mother and a few people who I was close to. On the whole, it was very embarrassing.”

It took him three days for his eyes to sense the first rays of light, and as his sight gradually returned, he looked at his sorry self, lying out in front of solemn, teary faces.

Three weeks later, Chris was up and about, upbeat as if nothing had happened. And as quickly as he had left alcohol, he returned to it. This time around, he had decided he was never returning to work.

With the stigma that had now come following the public knowledge of his botched suicide attempt, Chris only moved between his house and the pub. The then principal at Magutu Girls, Ms Nancy Njeru, who had graciously asked his colleagues to actively check on him when he was incapacitated, pleaded with him to resume work to avoid punishment by the TSC. Chris did not listen. The first interdiction came.

Chris’ first-born son was born in April 2014. Around that time, Chris stole money from his partner and vanished into the night, stopping at Naro-Moru, a vibrant town on the shoulders of Mt Kenya, where he stayed with his brother Mureithi. Here, he returned to online writing.

Always stumbling on luck, the TSC assigned him to Irigithathi Secondary School in Naro-Moru, a robust wayside town between Nyeri and Nanyuki, and on the shoulders of Mt Kenya, at the start of 2015.

False hope

Chris decided to turn over a new leaf and temporarily quit drinking, even managing to travel back to Karatina to see his son on his first birthday. But in September, he suddenly left his job and went back to clubs, brothels, and started sleeping in open farms sometimes.

“At this point, I was ready to die. I was cohabiting with bartenders, and nothing mattered anymore.”

By the end of that year, he had traveled back to Nairobi to stay with his sister Catherine in Ruai. For a while, he was settled, but then he returned to drinking, which meant he had to steal from his sister to fund his lifestyle. With these tendencies and associated recklessness, his sister kicked him out after just two months, sending him away with bedding, at a time when he admitted it would be good if he resettled.

He found his way to Chokaa, along Kangundo Road, where he was drinking, intending to die. In his pockets, he always carried sachets of rat poison, hoping to use them in one desperate moment. He met a bartending woman who took him in.

“Whatever I earned, I had to bring to her, in exchange for alcohol, food, sex, and shelter. Whenever I did not make anything, she kicked me out,” Chris says. He lost all contact with his family and waited to die.

Chokaa is a highly populated settlement off the Ngong River, with shacks sidling up to one another, and with endless rows of pubs in the dingy streets that branch off Kangundo Road.

It is one of eastern Nairobi’s most insecure neighbourhoods, with petty theft, kidnappings, and rape cases- a man named Aloyce Omondi alias Stano had been reportedly stabbed to death in a botched theft the morning I wrote this paragraph.

While he lived there, Chris’s sister Catherine was always worried about his safety. She drove along Kangundo Road every day to and from work, and every time she came across a drunk man sprawled across the roadside gutters, she slowed down to confirm it was not Chris.

“It was very draining. It was very difficult to live this way. You never know if the next call that comes informs you that he was killed in those drinking escapades and brawls,” she says.

Chris developed alcohol gastritis and was feeling very sickly in early 2017 when he dragged himself into a Missionaries of the Poor facility in Chokaa, pained, drained, and seeking salvation. He received counselling, and could have well been on a delusional journey that would see a recidivism soon. But this time around, he had decided.

“I started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I even reestablished contact with family and confessed to them that I had chosen a path of sobriety, and they welcomed my resolution with gratitude. I started writing and making money, and realized I was, although with great effort, able to stay away from alcohol.”

Alcoholics Anonymous is a global, peer-led mutual aid fellowship dedicated to abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism.

Addictions had not, however, left him for good. In 2018, he developed a gambling addiction.

The online football betting craze had grown like wildfire in Kenya, with figures from the regulator showing that local punters wagered more than Sh30 billion (£235m) in a single month in 2019. Chris was among those who used staggering amounts of money in betting. At this point, he had started importing and branding books and t-shirts, but he spent and lost millions in gambling.

Turning point

In 2020, he sought professional help to defeat these harmful addictions. That same year, he went back to school and took a diploma in addiction counselling at Support for Addictions Prevention and Treatment in Africa (SAPTA). The journey to reformation was well and truly on.

Chris got an international certification at ICAP, a global health leader situated at Columbia University. With his successive training, he was certified as a National Campaign Against Drug Abuse (Nacada) accredited recovery coach, and is now a certified gambling addiction counsellor.

To let people into his protracted battle with alcoholism, Chris embarked on social media awareness creation in 2022. On different platforms, he started making videos detailing some of his most troubled moments as an addict and answering questions from the public.

In a particular video on TikTok, where he has over 400 videos, 165,000 followers, and 2.7 million views, he explains how one afternoon, while in Pipeline, Embakasi, he met a girl he was friends with, and she gave him Sh100. As he had not eaten all morning, he thanked God profusely, then decided to buy cooking ingredients that he would take back into the house.

After doing so, however, he still had Sh40 on him, and he decided to enter a pub to drink ‘one cup’, and then he would rush home in time to catch the Safaricom staff bus, which used to pick him and his colleagues up for the evening shift.

He ended up spending the night in the pub, and by the time he got home the next day, the vegetables he had bought, which were still in their polythene bag, were rotting and smelly. He missed work for many consecutive days, starting then.

In 2023, Chris became a rehabilitation centre manager at Resolution Recovery Centre (RRC) in Karura ka Nyungu, Wangige, Kiambu, about 25 kilometres from Nairobi’s city centre. The facility has a bed capacity of 25 and is accredited by the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council (KMPDC) and Nacada. Two years later, he became a co-director at the facility, RRC, as well as a trainer of counsellors at SAPTA.

His sister Catherine feels like a proud parent.

“I am very, very proud of him. I keep telling him to keep going and never turn back. We trusted in the Lord, and look at him now. I can give anything for him to keep going,” she says proudly.

Family support

His parents feel the same. As he recovered, Chris’s father settled most of his debts, says Catherine — a sum that ran to nearly half a million.

Angela shares in the joy. “I feel so proud of him, and I continue to pray for him. As a family, we did not have it easy. We had four brothers who were drinking, and we are grateful that they have all changed their ways.”

Angela and Catherine never withdrew their support. When their brother asked for money, they sent it.

“We believed he would, one day, change. People tend to give up on their family members too soon. If you lack support from your family, it is over for you. Even the community will lose hope in you,” Angela says.

Now, Chris preaches hope to those battling alcoholism.

“I would like people to know that there is hope, but it starts with admitting there is a problem,” he says, reflecting on his own journey. “Addiction is a disease and should be treated as a medical issue, not a moral or criminal one.”

It is a family disease, he adds, because the entire household is affected even when only one person is afflicted. He acknowledges that he put his parents and eight siblings through a harrowing ordeal, including his brothers, who were also addicts but have since recovered.

Stigma, he says, remains one of the greatest obstacles to recovery. He urges society to embrace, rather than condemn, those who are making an effort to rebuild their lives.

He is not proud of his past

“Once, I found myself in my parents’ bedroom stealing, having climbed in through the ceiling. At the height of my alcoholism, I even went to elderly women’s houses in the village to borrow money, when I should have been the one giving it. One woman handed me the last note she had — a crumpled Sh50 — and I took it and went to drink. It was bad.”

In the early years of his recovery, temptation lingered.

“You accompany colleagues to an event, and they are drinking, of course, that is inviting,” he says. He also came to realise that while some people can enjoy alcohol, he was not, and would never be one of them.

“For an alcoholic, alcohol feels like the solution to an underlying problem. It numbs emotional and physical pain. But that relief is extremely short-lived.”

His friends, among them Peterson and James, have watched his transformation with pride.

“He is one of my best friends, and there is nothing better than seeing him thrive in what he does now,” James says.

Chris is now completing a Master’s degree in counselling psychology at Africa Nazarene University in Nairobi. He co-parents with the mother of his first child and is happily married. Catherine says he has become one of the most responsible people in the family — the go-to adviser on a range of issues and a source of inspiration to his siblings.