The grass is never greener on the other side. Part 1

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The grass on the other side is never greener, is a true account of Muthali life searching for greener pasture in the UAE.

Muthali a Kenyan young woman, is promised a job as a Sales Manager in the beautiful city of Dubai. When she  arrives the middle east, she is cheated.

 Her passport is taken away from her and she has to endure a life of hardship. As she shares her moving experience, you'll meet some of the dubious characters who color her life in all shades. You will cry along the way but ultimately fall in love with her fierce determination to succeed at all costs.
This book is broken into 15 parts for this blog and will be published every Thursday.

Enjoy.

My name is Muthali and I am Kenyan.

I am the first of four children, and so I should be a role model. That is very tough.

However I have never really known the meaning of tough till I arrived in the United Arab Emirates. The land where they say everything twinkles.

I was not really born into the upper class nor the middle class, I would say somewhere between the middle and lower class.

 In the beginning, my parents had jobs that provided for our very basic needs.

There was never extravagance in our home, but we were happy. My father worked in an agricultural firm as a field officer, and my mother traded in agricultural products but suddenly everything went awry.

As a child I remember Christmas, a lot of Christmases, but this particular one is etched in my heart and though it was long ago, it still feels like yesterday.

I must have been in class seven or eight, my dad lost his job and began to work with my mum, but as agricultural products are seasonal, we barely had enough to eat.

This Christmas day and we could not afford anything to eat, let alone festive clothes to buy as is common where I am from, so we stayed indoors.

There was no relative to go and spend time with as we did not have relationships with our aunts or uncles or grandparents.

My paternal grandmother and my mother did not get along so this strained our relationship with them. She had alleged that my mother stole her son away from her. It was stupid and funny, but I didn’t blame her, everyone knew my father adored my mother.

So that Christmas we were all at home, and we prayed throughout the day, waiting for a miracle. A miraculous meal actually.  We didn’t even want a sumptuous meal, just something to fill our hungry tummies, and it was only then that I realized how bad things had really turned around for us.

My fathers job had been quite stable before, but he suddenly ran into trouble at work over a customer complaint. The company he worked for said they were investigating the matter, and so they held on to his pension.

 As is with many African countries, the case has long been forgotten and no money has ever been paid.

We lived in Nairobi, beautiful Nairobi, definitely not in the beautiful parts but not in the slums either. We lived in Gildorai, a middle class area. My father had bought the piece of land a long time ago, long before it became developed, and built on it.

When we lived there, there were no neighbors, no houses on either sides of our house, there were just grass and trees surrounding our home of mud, it was much later after my father got some money that we built one of stone.

There was no transportation also, so whenever we went to the city we walked a far distance before we would see any form of houses or even civilization. All we had for friends were snakes and wild animals. It used to be very scary. We had all sorts of unwanted neighbors like the hippopotamus. I will always remember this one.

It was a wet morning and my father was going in search of work, on his way out, he saw the paw prints of a hippopotamus in front of our home so he ran back in to tell us to be very careful if we were to go outside to play. We were all so scared and did not go out that day, it was a day after my eighth birthday.  

Another time, there was a snake I saw it while playing catch with my siblings, it was very huge and it got caught in a sheet of paper. I remember running to get my mother in fear and she frightfully tried to kill it alongside my uncle who came visiting my father.  Unfortunately it freed itself and chased them dramatically before disappearing.

My family was quite a happy one, no matter how bad things  later turned out to be, there was love in our home and sometimes it made everything alright.

 I have sweet memories of that love. There was a time when I was at primary school, I lacked shoes and only had one pair of rain boots, I would wear it all through the hot summer months to school and when I couldn’t bear the blisters on my feet anymore I asked my mother if she could afford to get me a more comfortable pair, my mother looked me up and down when I asked her and she smiled, she drew me into her arms and told me she would get me many shoes, so many shoes that I would not be able to wear them all.

 She got me two pairs after that, a pair of rubber flip-flops and another pair of rubber sandals they were not pretty and the kids at school made fun of me for wearing flip-flops to school but I know it was probably the only thing she could afford, rubber sandals or flip-flops or not I was grateful for the shoes and I wore them till I could wear them no more.

Things got even worse after that. When I had to go to college, my younger brother had to go to secondary school also.  There was hardly any money for us to eat let alone go to school, but we were all very determined.

A breakthrough came when my father remembered some local saving people usually in those days, it was like a little insurance for rainy days, he had saved up quite a portion of his monthly income in the savings for about ten years, how he had forgotten all the time we went hungry I don’t know. With that money we were able to go to school. Sometimes i wonder what would have become of us, if not for the savings.

My parents were very happy, I knew them as a loving couple, there were hardly any fights between them. Even when my father lost his job, my mother stood by him like a rock.

It took him a while to find another job, he always told us to pray hard about a job he hoped to get and we all did, I did more than the others because I was tired of going hungry and giving up some of my food for my younger siblings.

To be continued next week.