In Mathare, drugs, alcohol and pregnancy go hand in hand

It was not long before she started using drugs right under her father’s roof.

“I went to Mathare Primary School, where I was introduced to drugs by fellow pupils. I started smoking bhang and taking chang’aa which was easily available while in Standard Seven,” said Agunja.

The mother of three said she came back home, on countless occasions, intoxicated. She would go straight to her room and sleep since her father hardly checked on them.

Countless occasions

In Form One, things got out of hand. She could barely resist the daily urge to drink and smoke. She dropped out of school in Form Two because she had to find ways and means to sustain her addiction, and it came along with her first pregnancy.

“In 2007, after the delivery of my child, I started receiving psycho-social support and counselling from friends, but this did not stop me. In the evenings I would still go and take one for the road,” said Agunja.

It got to a point where she resorted to selling her belongings and stealing whenever she needed money for alcohol.

“When my family saw that I was not changing, they decided to leave, and I remained alone,” said a tearful Agunja.

Currently, she is involved in various workshops around Mathare where women in drugs are counselled. She also got a job as a storekeeper in one of the churches around.

“Now I can stay for one or two days without drinking or smoking because the work I do here as a storekeeper keeps me busy,” she said.

Agunja believes her closeness to ‘Nigeria Ndogo’ contributed to her addiction. So prevalent is drug dealing in the area that local residents have nicknamed the slum Nigeria, after the West African country which has earned the reputation as one of the major conduits for drugs on the continent.

Got pregnant

In Nigeria Ndogo, one can buy cocaine, heroin, bhang, LSD and other sorts of drugs. That is not all, at the “right price” you can even buy a gun.

Another victim, Everlyne Ados, 25, started smoking bhang, taking cocaine and drinking chang’aa when she was at Kiboro Primary School in Mlango Kubwa Ward.

Sale of chang’aa around the school is rampant and so it was not long before she tasted it.

Ados dropped out of school in 2009 in Form One due to lack of school fees.

Stealing to buy cocaine and cheap alcohol became the order of the day. This is also the year she got pregnant.

The eighth of nine siblings, Ados found it hard to survive with a mother who did manual jobs to sustain them. She had to steal from people and sell these things for food and drugs.

“Feeding all of us was a problem. I used to go without food sometimes and I did not care because once I take a tablet (cocaine) I’m good,” she said.

Ados decided to stay away from drugs when her friend was lynched for stealing.

The senior chief in charge of Mlango Kubwa, Kiamaiko and Hospital wards, Julia Kamwara, revealed that she handles about 50 drug related cases in a day.

Counselling session

During an interview with Kamwara, a parent from Mlango Kubwa brought his 17-year-old son who is in Form Two at a school in Mathare for counselling.

The boy admitted that he has been smoking bhang since he was in Standard Six, and buys it from Nigeria Ndogo. The father said he had tried to stop him from smoking bhang but in vain.

The boy, without his father’s knowledge, had missed school for a week and was called by the head teacher to inquire why.

The boy blames his habit on peer pressure, adding that it is near impossible to stop if half of the students smoke bhang.

“As a leader of this community, sometimes I feel mentally disturbed because the cases that come to my office can really traumatise someone. They are too much,” said Kamwara.

Surprisingly, in an assessment done in the then Starehe Constituency in 2014 by Community Anti-drug Coalitions of Kenya, women topped in the abuse of bhang (48 per cent), illegal alcohol (31 per cent), shisha (15.7 per cent) and hard drugs (20.1 per cent).

A very worrying trend was observed where the age group of 10 to 20 years topped the list of the respondents, who abused miraa (61 per cent), bhang (67 per cent), spirits (40 per cent), shisha (17 per cent) and hard drugs (17 per cent).