I am not my weight

“I realised I was overweight at a very young age. I remember there was a day I went to the kindergarten in tights and a shirt and the teacher pulled me aside and told me to wear shorts on top.

“I wondered why, since the other kids were dressed just like me but were not told to put on any extra clothing,” Wangui Waigwa says.

She says being overweight destroyed her confidence and in her quest for acceptance, she turned to alcohol when she was 12 years old and progressed to smoking and using hard drugs in her high school years.

Wangui, 25, has always struggled with her weight. “My mum tells me I weighed 10kg when I was seven months.”

She says she struggled to make friends in kindergarten because of her weight and that slowly ate at her confidence. It got worse when she proceeded to primary school.

“I went to boarding school and during the onset of adolescence, girls started getting love letters. No boy seemed to be interested in me because of my weight and that hurt my self-esteem.”

Wangui went on an extreme diet to lose weight, though it didn’t work. “I used to starve myself. I would go for days without eating and would faint sometimes, but I didn’t stop. I wanted to lose weight and be accepted.”

One day, while Wangui was watching a movie, she saw a character being told by her friend she could lose weight by drinking alcohol. And just like that, Wangui started drinking.

“I stole some of my dad’s liquor. I didn’t even start with the light stuff. I went straight for the hard stuff.”

Wangui started sneaking alcohol into school and although she did not exhibit overt signs of intoxication, she became rebellious and was suspended several times.

“My parents thought it was just a phase so they did not pay too much attention to it,” she says. Despite all her efforts, she did not lose any weight.

Bad girl

By the time she was in high school, she had made friends with older people since “people thought I was older because of my weight.”

She would sneak out of home and attend parties and when school opened, she would tell her friends about her escapades and they would be  fascinated.

“I became the cool, bad girl. I realised I didn’t have to lose weight to make what I thought were friends. I just needed to stay cool. So I kept drinking and telling my new friends about my escapades.”

Wangui, however, realised she needed something else to maintain her “cool” title.

“In high school, many teenagers experiment with alcohol. I realised I needed to be a step ahead to remain relevant.”

This is when she turned to smoking cigarettes, using cocaine and chewing miraa. “I got introduced to all these drugs by the older crowd I was hanging out with.”

The effects of the drugs started to weigh on Wangui and she became even more rebellious and was expelled from four schools.

By the time she had completed high school, she was an addict. “When I started drinking and doing drugs, it was never about getting high, but rather the search for acceptance. I thought I could quit alcohol and drugs if I wanted to, but I was wrong.”

She started using her allowance to buy alcohol, and when that ran out, she stole appliances from her parents’ home to sell to get money for drugs and alcohol.

“When I ran out of appliances to sell, I turned to stealing from my friends.” She says she would steal her friends’ wallets when they were drunk.

“There was a time I went for a sleep-over and I stole my friend’s laptop while she was in the bathroom. I wasn’t discrete about it. I just took the laptop and disappeared.”

Cops at her door

Her friends got tired of her thieving ways and called the police on her. “I wasn’t fazed. The alcohol and drugs had hardened me so when the cops came to our house, I was just like – oh, okay.”

Her parents bailed her out about five times. Each time, Wangui promised to change, but she would go back to stealing.

In 2009, at the age of 19, she stole again and was arrested but this time, her parents had had enough.

“My dad did not bail me out and I ended up at the Lang’ata Women’s Prison. It was a terrible experience and it hardened me even more.”

She says she learned more “tricks” while in prison. Her father bailed her out after three weeks and he thought she had learnt her lesson but she returned to her old ways.

Her parents took her to a rehabilitation centre for three months but she went back to her old ways.

Call from “an old friend”

One day, Wangui got a call from a woman she had met in prison. “She had been released and was looking for a receptionist for her company.”

“Although it was a drugs business, I did not participate in the drug-peddling. I was just the receptionist and it was my first real job. She paid well too because being a drugs business, she wanted people to be quiet about it.

“She reached out to me to work for her because I had done drugs and it didn’t startle me. Also, having spent time in jail, she knew I wouldn’t be fazed if things went bad and cops showed up.”

With a good monthly salary, she left home without a word. After paying rent, she says she had a lot of money left to feed her alcohol and drugs addiction.

Her new-found freedom was however cut short a year later when her employer ended up in prison again.

“I had no money and I was back to square one. I hadn’t talked to my family in over a year and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

The prodigal daughter returns

Wangui says she started to think about how her life was turning out. “I thought there must be more to life. All the people I had finished high school with had completed their degrees and there I was having made nothing out of myself.”

She packed her bags and moved back into her family’s house. When she arrived, she said nothing to her parents, nor did they to her. She stayed indoors for about a month, just watching the days go by.

She says she he had to rebuild her relationship with her family from scratch.

“They didn’t know me anymore, nor did I know them. We started to reconnect but they were cautious because they were not sure if I was going to just wake up and leave again.”

One day, she read a story about a Chinese bamboo farmer.

The man had watered the plant for years but had nothing to show for it. His family abandoned him and said he was hopeless. In the fifth year, the bamboo tree just shot up 80 feet.

“That story gave me hope,” she says.

Slowly, she started to change her life. She quit drinking and doing drugs and started eating healthy. The weight she had been struggling with for all those began to fall off. “With my clean eating, I have lost 64kg since 2013,” she says.

New beginnings

Inspired by the bamboo story, Wangui started a business and nowadays sells bamboo flooring. She plans to start a foundation, Mlango Wazi, to help addicts.

“Sometimes, all an addict needs is someone to listen to him without providing solutions or judging. There is always an alternative.

“You may feel like you have sunk so deep into a bad situation, but just know, you can leave your past behind and start something afresh.”