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I'm Mbisi!

I got my first paid job back in 2002 after college at a pharmaceutical company along Mombasa Highway. We were being paid casual labor wages every two weeks amounting to Shs.189 per day working six days a week. One of the reasons for the low pay was because the Asian owners had hired excess workers in the factory, mostly as a favor to their clients, who were mostly officials in government departments like the Ministry of Health, KEMSA, and KEMRI. Sort of like a quid pro quo saying, "Do you have a jobless relative? Bring them in and we'll employ them. But first you need to do something for us" sort of reasons.

Long story short, we were about a thousand casuals all scrambling for relevance along the corridors of an Indian-owned company, earning peanuts, friends with colleagues who could only afford to live in a nearby slum village called Kwa Njenga, and daily getting used to the unfairness of life with a smile on our faces.

I came in through a friend of my mum who worked at KEMRI and only met him once, the day I went to introduce myself to him and he gave me the introduction letter to take to the company. I had just completed a course in chemistry, which I never liked and was hoping to gain some experience in a quality control lab somewhere.

My expectations were dashed on day one when I finally got in as a casual and was posted in a small department called documents. Here we used to deal with SOPs, inventories, and daily targets, and one of my roles was to monitor daily tasks for every department, fill a certain form and hand it to the production manager at the end of each work day. It was a very boring task as I would only do serious work for less than an hour each day.

I had three other colleagues in the unit and we would mostly just chat all day as the rest of the company did real work. We then discovered that there was another staff in the unit who was on maternity leave. We would wonder aloud what kind of work she would be coming back to do when her leave was finally over. 

One morning she suddenly returned from her three month-long leave to find two additional staff in the already overstaffed unit. She immediately raced her insecure self to the production manager's office worried about her precious job. They catch up for what looked like an hour and she comes back to her desk with a stack of files saying, "I'm mbisi today." 

Day two, she comes in as everyone else does in the morning and first thing she does is run to the Asian operations manager's office. Again she comes back with a stack of files, saying, "I'm mbisi." And from that time we would chuckle each time she came back from the office of the boss with her usual stack of files yapping for all and sundry to hear her say, I'm mbisi.


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