The journey from Kakamega to Nairobi was long enough for Faith Musikoyo to accept a marriage proposal from the man that sat next to her.
The two got to know a few things about each other and even agreed to live as husband and wife.
Faith learnt that the man, who she prefers to call Silas, was a construction contractor in the city who was looking for a girl to marry.
It was good news for Faith who says she had nowhere to go that day after she fled from her home in Mumias.
She had quarrelled with her parents and in anger, she boarded a Nairobi-bound bus without knowing who would be her host.
In the excitement that she would have a roof over her head, Faith never thought of digging deeper into who Silas truly was. She later learnt he was already a family man. He would later try to kill her after locking her in the house and raping her for a whole month.
Faith admits that she entered the marriage because it was the only option she had.
Faith, 28, is now an actress at Shoeback Media, an online platform that showcases short skits on reproductive health for people living in informal settlements
She says that marriages for lack of basic needs are referred to as part-time jobs by slum dwellers.
"When Silas expressed interest in me, I was elated not because I had developed feelings for him in the few hours I knew him on that bus. In fact, I wasn't ready for marriage. I just knew I would have a place to call home and that was enough for me at that time," she says.
But it wasn't the first marriage that Faith was getting married for convenience.
She first moved in with a man the first time she ran away from home when she was unable to endure frequent Wrangles in her polygamous family.
Faith travelled to Nairobi and found refuge at her aunt's place, which aunt lived in a single room in Korogocho where they paid Sh200 rent.
"Living with my aunt, her husband and three children in that one room was very hard. We were always unable to pay rent most times and survived on just one meal every day," she says.
Meanwhile, she battled the allure to join slum gangs for survival. She would later escape two rapes in the slum when she resisted the invitation to join the gangs that terrorised slum residents.
When she was down on her luck, she met Justus*, a boy she had known in her high school days. She immediately joined Justus who lived with seven other siblings in Babadogo, one of Nairobi's low-end estates.
With a Sh2, 000 salary from a teaching job that Faith landed in Babadogo, she was able to contribute to the living costs with her eight new friends.
But something else defined her relationship with Justus.
"Sometimes I looked at him as a brother. He was also my friend but we also started sleeping together. It was hard to define the nature of our relationship. When we decided to look for a single room where we would share the Sh1,000 rent, we also continued sleeping together until we all lost our jobs," she recalls.
The two were homeless again when they lost their jobs and parted ways. She would try her luck in the village but ended up fighting with her parents.
It was when she left the village after the disagreement with her parents that she met Silas and entered her second marriage.
When Sials took her in, he got her pregnant and rushed to formalise marriage arrangements with her parents. He even took gifts to them.
"Once or twice, I also visited his parents' home. And all that time, they never told me that Sials was married and had children who travelled to Nairobi when I was back in his village," she says.
Silas would later pay for her journalism course with help from her parents who had jumped at the idea of their daughter getting married.
A few months into the marriage, when Faith was also settled in college, her husband started abusing her physically and emotionally.
"He was a control freak and very insecure. He was totally against the idea of me going to school. He banned me from communicating with my friends, both male and female and smashed my phone three times when he caught me chatting with them. At some point, he locked me in the house for several days and I started having convulsions because of the emotional turmoil he subjected me to," she says.
To curtail her studies, Silas forced her to get pregnant.
"He raped me for a month to ensure that I got pregnant, and I sure did. I got three children with him but two died. I walked away with the third one when he started beating me in my son's presence," she says.
Most of Musikoyo’s acting portrays how poverty and peer pressure drive young people especially those living in informal settlements into crime, drug abuse and unconventional marriage arrangements.
"Part-time marriages happen in slums all the time. I know girls who were married on the day that they didn't have a meal in their homes. I know others who were married when the landlords chased them from their homes," she says.
She adds: "They are jobs because you get some kind of pay at the end of the day. You get in a marriage and a man uses you to satisfy himself sexually and in turn gives you meals and a place to sleep. He also gives you security in the slums where there are many dangerous gangs," she says.
According to Faith, there is usually no emotional fabric to hold part-time marriages together.
"One walks away when they get some form of breakthrough such as a job. But some get stuck when they get pregnant and are forced to stay in the relationship however abusive it is," she says.
Dr Sammy Gitaari, a Theology lecturer at the International Leadership University says part time marriages are rife in Nairobi's informal settlements.
"I have been a preacher at a church in Kayole and in Mathare slums and I have seen girls hook up with some random boy to escape one problem or another. There are lots of such cases in the slums," says Dr Gitaari.
He says poverty should never be an excuse for people to enter dangerous relationships.
"It is solving a problem by creating a bigger problem. It is better to move in with a fellow woman if you don't have a place to go," he says.
Gitaari says he has seen such marriages end in termination of pregnancies because of unwanted children, violence and death when the other party feels they are being taken advantage of.
