Agush Nyang

Pararad like a Salamander

Was I just a stubborn, hard child hating the life of working in the shambas on hungry stomachs or on only terrible horribly cooked non-meals of black millet and sorghum ugali and skuma wiki before being told to take the cows to Masagisagi stream or River Migori near the Soo banks where we would swim and bathe and leave looking pale and “pararad”, with broken, rough, parched skins looking like salamanders and geckos, and which would be how I myself learned my now very good swimming skills?

We sat down with our sister and she started narrating to us how her life after running away had been. Turns out, she had disappeared from the horrible horror that had been home, and had hopped from one stranger’s house to another. She told us that she had ended up with a stranger’s family in Eldoret, East of Western Kenya, where she had been taken up, adopted and raised. She told us how that family had been nice to her all her life, how she had been schooled, and had just finished high school. And now she had come home finally.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly how I once had a sister, then one day didn’t, and for years didn’t, and how we finally got our sister back. And life has never been the same again.

Figure sis, me and bro idk when

So life went on rather well and seamlessly, and I went on to report to the university, The Technical University of Kenya, a whole other ordeal that is deserving of its own whole chapter if not book, altogether. I then went on to live with a distant uncle, and so one day, while living in Huruma slums with the uncle, (who is the brother of Maurice Wuon Tony), I was very broke and I sought to call any of my numerous relatives. And my first thought wen to a distant uncle, called Ngala. He was one of the sons of one of the 6 wives of our late grandpa. I called him and asked for some money, and he gave me I think it was 700 bob, and amount which meant the world to me at that moment and time. And thereafter, I would some days go to his house in kayole to just relax and cool off especially when the situation home was bad, which it often was.

Remember my daily prayers to be delivered from the horrible horror hands of Rachel Otuoma’s mom? Well one day God answered my prayers and uncle Ngala told me I could come and do some manual work at Standard Media Group, the makers of the standard newspapers where he worked, for 600 a night working from 10 to around 1am. One can only imagine my joy. I mean this was good money and an opportunity for which I had prayed and hoped for, for so long, and I was finally going to be able to at least fend for myself, at least barely. I was finally going to be free, or so I thought. I had my whole life prayed for exactly such an opportunity where I could go to work but still be able to go to school without any problems, and God had finally blessed me with an exact such opportunity through my uncle.

I have always felt that I am the most cursed yet also the most blessed person on earth. I mean if I really think about it, God has answered almost all my prayers exactly how I prayed them. But then some very horrible stuff have also happened to me in life, that make me think I am the unluckiest. But then again when I also think about it, far worse have happened to others. But they were horrible alright.

So I got the job, and our job was that we were the ones binding and loading the newspapers into the vans that distributed them throughout the country at night. Contrary to what most believe, they are not distributed by choppers or air for that matter, but by vans. They are published very late into the night, like say 9pm and distributed by vans overnight, for you to get them at your local newsstand or office reception table or supermarket stand in the morning. And so we did all the loadings and binding, all that for 600 per night, and that was good money. But it wasn’t an every day gig. On a good week we had like 2500, sometimes 1200 etc. Good money for a comrade at that time all the same, not too shabby for me at least. I would do this job even later after I had gotten the Urban Waters water delivery and flyer distribution gig. I would sometimes go home with the bike, the motorbike we used for water delivery. I can almost too vividly remember when I once took home the motorbike, at the time living at the men’s hostels, . And I thought to go with it to the newspaper gig, but then what happened was one of the worst accidents I’d had at the time. On the way there I crashed so badly I nearly died. I don’t know what happened but one minute I was speeding past Panari Hotel on Mombasa Road, and the next I was lying next to some ditch, cars speeding past me. Well not that I didn’t exactly know, I knew exactly. It had been my careless riding and poor riding skills at the time. But God has always been with me. I got very bad wounds, deep wounds which, like the many I had been suffering, took not less than 3 weeks to heal. It was a painful and horrifying experience.

Over my tenure at Urban Waters, I crashed like not less than 5 times, which is why I am such a good rider these days, eh? They says you have to crash and get involved in a few accidents for you to become an experienced motorist, right? For several months working at KCB bank in Mombasa and a little while after I was fired for forging a manager’s signature, I had a bike (an old rackety bike I had bought for like just 20k not even really thinking twice about it), and never once crashed it. It was a raggedy bike but was not bad, it used to transport me every day to and from work, for I used to stay very far from work, all the way in mazeras, in Kilifi county technically, some 40km from Mombasa CBD and KCB Kilindini branch where I worked for those close to 2 years (but tell everyone reading my CV and LinkedIn that it was for 5 years. ). It probably saved me thousands over that period. Well also, not exactly never, not that I never crashed it ever. I once ran into a speeding matatu at an intersection and got light wounds, and my pillion passenger also a bruise or two. He was a neighbor I had been carrying everyday to work but after the incident cancelled his daily commute contract with me and cut off the daily 200 bob I had been milking off him.

Well so that day I crashed the bike so badly near Panari Hotel on Mombasa Road on high speed rushing to work the newspaper loading gig where as I said, we also used to bind the newspapers (somehow they wanted them bound, and inserted with or into some mini adverts or newspaper special ads inside the main newspaper). I however would continue going into work everyday with unhealed wounds and in pain like nothing really had happened, for I really couldn’t afford to go without the 1500 or so a week, for that meant I’d have to go hungry that week.

Figure newspaper binding job

I would later be fired from this newspaper gig for stealing. Well it had been a racket we had been running for some time. Come to think of it, I have been fired from every job I have ever had. That’s a worrying thing and trend. Oh well. I don’t care. But really I need to retrospect and examine my life, do I not. To hell with it. But guys come on I can’t really keep this up for long can I? I will one day need to hold down a job and be one of those guys you hear they say have spent like 5 years, 7 years or even way more etc. at a job. Oh well to hell with it. Anyway.

So what happened is, we used to steal newspapers. We would leave with coats and jackets and trousers a little fatter than we had clocked in with. On a good day and with a good, really large enough coat, you would manage to get away with like 5 newspapers. Sell that at 30 bob or 40bob on a good day and you got a cool 200 bob daily on the side. Well until one day we would be caught and banished. Everyone did it even some of the supervisors. But oh well. .

Just months before being fired, I also got an extra day shift also doing the same for their weekly magazine called ‘The Nairobian’ - A magazine I once so badly slandered back in my blogging and campus politics days. I had been a very ardent campus politics blogger and activist, and have even won an award for it.

I had and still do maintain a website, brianisaacpress.wordpress.com, where for over 10 years now I have written over 1000 very insightful articles ranging on IT, Financial Markets, Market Research, etc. I still do maintain it, together with yet another a site kenyahiring.wordpress.com which claims I do job placement like we claimed at Emploi. All these are in addition to yet another site fpse.netlify.app where I claim I do securities trading.

Figure Part of what i did at Emploi, graphic design

The Magazine job was however a day job, but similarly not everyday, just a once-in-a-while-few-days-like-say-2-in-a-week job. It could be and was done during the day since its not a daily publication, they do not have to publish and print it at night like a daily. At the time I stayed with a distant cousin, Faruk, who we would one day fight so badly with, the neighbours had to separate us. I won that fight even though he is like a year older haha. It really was a stupid fight. He said I used to use too much of the peanut butter we had bought. Such utter nonsense. So what if I ate a little peanut butter. Was it peanut butter or strawberry jam? I think jam it was, haha. Anyway.

At that time we lived in a mabati shanty in Mbotela near where I had lived in my second year at TUK with the distant relative, Aketch and his nice wife in Jogoo Road near Church Army. I tell you I have almost literally lived everywhere in Nairobi. Think of a slum and there are high chances I at one point found myself bunking there especially during one of the numerous times things got to get real bad in life, financially. To think I even once lived in the Mbotela shanties, haha. We would later shift with him and live in some slum in Mukuru Kwa Njenga, just before pipeline area of Nairobi. Months later I would move into my own mabati shanty within the same slums and area, and where I would one day bring Teresia after I brought her from her school and we would have some hot mabati house s*x. People always say s*x in a mabati house while its raining outside, is the best -that the sound of raindrops hitting the mabati is just so...you know...haha.

So now lets go back to an account, a chronological account, of my campus life. Lets go back to school. So as I said, I stayed in my first year at the university with Mama Rachel in Huruma slums, and then when finally the year ended and we went back home for the long holidays, I breathed a sigh of relief. I swore to never go back to that woman’s house even if it meant dropping out of school at just first year. I swore and told my uncles and everyone even my grandma, I wasn’t going back to that misery.

When second year first semester was due, it was arranged that going forward , I’d live with the other relative, yet another distant, really-not-a-relative relative, Aketch. I honestly I swear to God I didn’t know how he is related to us, or I to him, all that while, and all this while even up to now. But he is a relative alright. He used to be a CS working at Nyayo House(hopefully not when they were still the t*****e chambers). A CS, i.e. Civil servant not CS as in Cabinet Secretary aka a Minister, no, just a civil servant. I think he was a clerk or something with the Ministry of Interior, I think. He lived at the government quarters along Jogoo Road near Church Army opposite St Stephen ACK, opposite that company that makes the strawberry jams, just a short distance from the place where I would months or a year or so later once live with the yet other distant cousin Faruk, and fight over bread spread, with. ( At the time living with him as roommates and both working at standard newspapers for, see my uncle had gotten a newspaper job to not just I, but several other relatives here and there too over the time and years.

Aketch’s wife was the best. He was a soft spoken woman, didn’t have many words or issues. Was a nice change of pace after all the hell women and women from hell at whose hands I had been thrown by life, all my life. She used to have a little niece or sister or something who sometime came and lived with us, and who would be my first actual s*x experience. The warmth, the grip the sweetness, it was all too new and felt good. We hid around, no one ever knew. If she ever read this, she(the wife of Aketch who I lived with) will be so shocked. I don’t know what she will think. Well it was only thrice or 4 times, and it happened long ago, she probably won’t mind. Before you say anything no she wasn’t a cousin or anything . I mean if even her aunt’s (or big sister, or I don’t really know who she was to her) husband is who I can’t in the first place even place how I am related to, how can I her ?, haha.

Oops, gotta go. Its bookhwakh haha. You won’t get it. Its 1705 and I have to get off work and continue this at home. This is good stuff. The ‘gotta go, its bukhwakh’ reference is actually a very funny story. I love cartoons, more specifically family guy(so much), American Dad, Brickleberry(in my opinion the best ever) etc. This is from family guy, Stewie tries to ask some intriguing religious questions to a Jewish religious leader, but he evades Stewie’s questions and all over sudden says …“oops gotta go its bukhwak..” or something, haha. I swear its so funny to me. I love it so much.

I get home. I call my sister on the way and I tell her all about a book I’m writing and that should anything happen to me, she should get it out. She says I should stop talking crazy, she’s tryna book Beyonce for a wedding day. I won’t explain that. My adoptive son Vardy is watching cartoons, …cocomelon, skidamarink kadukadu, I love you, skidamarink, I love you…something something. I tell her to put on for him from time to time some educative cartoons such as Ms Rachel instead, I don’t know.

Figure In class, around 3rd year at TUK.

So back to my campus life, or rather campus hell story. As I said, I couldn’t apply for the HELB student loans because I was only 17 when we joined and were to apply for them, and my ID card hadn’t come by the next time we could, the next year (of the calendar and of my university education). So when my ID finally came and I could apply for the HELB, I got my first 60k student loan (for I am totally orphaned. Others got, I think, 35k only. Poor them. Who told them not to have their parents dead so they’d get 60k like me?). Those are the kind of dark jokes you find in Brickleberry and Family Guy, and which I so much love. I’m sorry, I didn’t just say that as a joke, did I? I just now think of an American Dad joke where Stan goes to a house conducting some kind of census and he asks an orphaned poor boy who answers the door, “How many people live here?” The boy tells him, “Just me and my mum,” to which Stan asks, “So just two?” But the poor boy hadn’t finished speaking. He continues, “…just me ..and my mum…my dad ..died,” and Stan interrupts to ask if it’s just the two or just the three people, before the boy finishes by adding that the dad actually died, to which Stan says the boy wasted his time a little bit, haha. It’s so funny, trust me. I mean, typing and reading it probably won’t be as funny to you, especially if you don’t like those kinds of jokes, but trust me, it is.

I got the 60k towards the end of second year and could finally move out and begin life on my own in Nairobi, and let me tell you, Maina (something of a Kenyan meme reference few will get, probably many though), it was the start of a very horrible phase of my life, but little did I know that at the time. The constant twists and turns, job and gig after another job and gig, being fired after being fired, fights after fights, s*x after s*x, sleeping hungry after sleeping hungry, desperation after another, relationships after another, living in slum after slum, wueh. I’ve gone through it all in this Nairobi, just leave.

Anyway, I first rented a mabati shanty in Landi Mawe 200m from school, and was roommates with my friend Osango, who actually hails from somewhere near home in Oruba Sangla, Migori, too. I think we paid 6k a month, that’s 3 each. Not bad. So it’s this 60k that was supposed to cover fees, food, rent, girlfriend money, etc.? I occasionally ate chicken but mostly ate like chicken, a little joke from campus, meaning eating chicken, and [eating like chicken means] eating the foods chickens eat like maize, kale, etc. Haha.

Figure At Denno's place, landi mawe. I used to visit him, he was one of the chief cartels of data bundles fraud, and still is. He is now very rich. A kalenjin, obviously haha. He works with Virgin Cruises abroad as a Finance guy and is into Crypto stuff.

From there, I moved in with yet another guy, Elijah, currently into some scam stuff, (is filthy rich by the way, now). I just usually see his social posts status, he’s apparently selling I don’t know greens, reds, PayPal logins stuff, I don’t know. Must be card theft, swap, PayPal scam stuff, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just jealous.

So the guy had a very fat girlfriend, and he once brought her over, and one morning (or should we say moaning, haha) was having s*x with her on the bed while I was right there next to them behind and across the thin curtain, and I was furious. How dare he disrespect me like that. Must have been karma, if you remember what I mean. I stormed out and couldn’t stay for even one more second after I heard them. It must have been 6 a.m. I walked around and about and came back at around 9 or 10 a.m., then I broke out an all-out war and fought him. It was a tough fight. I did alright, I might even say I think I won that one too. Well, I’m a tough guy, don’t see me this way this way. In my whole life, its only a few fights that I have I been unable to win. I can only remember one, by the way. It was with Fred. We fought while at the hostels, he ambushed me, pinned me, and hit me in the head a few times before I broke away and stood my ground, but the fight ended. We were fighting over some stuff, he thought I’d stolen from him. I really hadn’t, he was just mistaken or drunk or both, the fool.

See, he was engaged in some illegal SIM card theft and gambling fraud stuff, but then so was I, kind of. I had kind of been working for him at the end. There were very rampant such scams in campus. What they did was, they discovered a loophole and exploited it. First, let’s start with the SIM card bundles scams where Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco, had some promos at the time. For every new subscriber, you were given about 2GB of free data bundles as a welcome gift. So what they did was, they had a place along Luthuli Avenue to buy SIM cards in bulk, and had some stolen IEBC data of almost everyone in Kenya: your name, ID number, date of birth, etc., which were the only details needed at the time to register a new SIM and get the free data. This was before the SIM registration rules became more stringent. They would do this for thousands of cards and had people like us doing the actual registrations. They would then sell these data bundle SIM cards cheaply to students who scrambled for them as a cheaper option to the expensive data bundles sold legally.

Let’s say 2GB of Safaricom data lasting 30 days cost 300, they would sell this at 100 and sell like 500 of these in a single day. That’s a cool 50k made in just a day, on a bad day. I heard some of them in such rackets, like Denis, even made millions off this.

The second scam involved gambling, i.e., football betting. See, gambling companies at the time, (this is around the 2018–2019 area we’re talking about), would grant new users free betting bonuses. For example, SportyBet, Betway, Betika, etc., if you created a new account with them, they gave you say 500 bob free to bet with, as a welcome gift. But to register, you had to have a betting account created with and unique to only one phone number/SIM Card, a problem we had seen how them crooks like Fred, Nashon, Jack, Denis, Dansu, (their real names, by the way, I don’t care), had solved.

They had the place to buy such SIMs in bulk, even hundreds to a thousand pieces or so in number (at like only one bob each), and had a way to register them under the then weak and lax rules as we had seen. They then used them to sign up on, say, Betika football betting platform, create a new account, and get the 500 bob free (not actual cash you could withdraw), which you could use it to bet.

Ok, are we together up to that point? Maybe some of you already know exactly what they then did, or maybe you’ve done a similar thing, or actually once did this exact scam, like I did haha. I swear I wasn’t exactly one of them -save for the aiding and abetting and being an accessory before, after and during the fact, haha. If I was really one of the scammers my life would probably have been very different. But I used to miss meals and trek to school and deferred for lack of fees, so obviously not.

But I used to play an albeit small part in this scam operation, alright. So they would log in to say the Betika site, and with the account linked to the fake number they had just registered, and place an impossible-to-lose bet. You see how betting works, say Man U is playing Arsenal, obviously there is a high likelihood that Arsenal would beat Man U(especially right now, haha). So obviously, the betting guys know this and have set it such that if you predict Arsenal will beat Man U, and they do, meaning you are right and have won the bet, the amount of money you’d earn is less than you would in the unlikely chance that Man U shocks everyone and wins.

But everyone knows how betting works, so let me skip that. So the odds of Man U beating Arsenal are, say, 10, meaning if you stake 100 bob and they beat Arsenal, you win 10 times 100, that’s 1k, a cool 900 profit. At that time, the odds of Arsenal beating Man U are, say, 2, meaning if they beat Man U, which they most likely will, and you staked 100, you would win 200, a cool 100 profit. And the odds of them drawing are, say, 3, in which case you get 300.

Now Fred and co. didn’t want to risk, and since it’s free money, on one betting account registered with and linked to the fake SIM they had had, and with the free 500 welcome betting bonus gift, they would stake the 500 and bet that Arsenal would beat Man U. Meaning since the odds were 2, they’d win 500 times 2, which is 1000, a cool 1000–500 = 500 profit. But wait, the 500 they used to bet wasn’t theirs in the first place, so technically, that’s 1000 profit right there.

On another account with another line that they fake-registered and got the free 500bob welcome betting bonus, they’d stake that Man U would beat Arsenal. The odds are 10, so should Man U win, that’s a cool 500 × 10 = 5000, free money. On a third line, they’d stake a draw and the winnings would be say 500 × 3 = 1500.