In 2017, had you told Eunice Otieng’ that she would one day be a homeowner and a landlady when her life was crumbling to pieces, she would never have believed you.
Arguably the most brutal year of her life, Eunice was riddled with a myriad of problems. Her husband had left her to be with another woman.
The mother of one had to facilitate huge sums of loans she’d taken out for him when they were together. Soon after, the cracking point was when she and her baby girl were evicted from their house due to unpaid rent arrears circling over months.
Eunice forged a resilient and compelling character. She decided to recollect herself, build upon this mess and start over from scratch.
Albeit the task being challenging, with her little salary from her nurse job and all the odds stacked against her, she was victorious.
“I almost ran mad with my small salary. I had no option but to think about how to start life from zeros. I had a motorcycle which I took and started a boda boda job,” she remembered.
The woman who hails from Busia said that she had to plan herself accordingly to make the most out of her paycheck and side hustle. Her nurse monthly stipend would go into the repayment of loans she took for her husband.
Being that she worked a nurse night shift, during the day, Eunice would hustle as a boda boda rider during the day.
Over a period of time, she managed to save Sh. 26,000 which she committed to starting a small venture in 2018.
She had also bought a piece of land before marrying her ex-hubby. On it, she started building a house and several other rental houses. Her gusto was fuelled by the desire to give her baby girl a better life.
READ: Jones Nyaberi: I used Boda savings to build two 3-bedroom houses worth Sh. 1.5 million
“I decided that I will work hard for my baby to get the best. I think I was working with a lot of anger to change my life. That’s why I was able to change my life. That’s why I was able to finish the house,” Otieng noted.
A conscientious warrior, Eunice did not give in to the unrelenting pressure that riddled her life.
She made her five-year-old daughter a landlady by gifting her one of the rentals, to heal the pain and rub the warm bitter tears they shed when their former landlord locked their house.
“I gifted her the houses to wipe the tears we cried when the landlord locked our house. I vowed to make her a landlady at this tender age,” she divulged.
