“My name is Gregory Muchiri. I am 38 years old. On an ordinary day, you will find me in Kirigiti, Kiambu County, where I run a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts. The centre is known as Ahadi Treatment Centre.

I started it eight years ago. Perhaps I would not have started it were it not for my personal battles with addiction. Certainly, my life would not have taken the course it took had I not gotten hooked to drugs and alcoholism.

I am lucky to be alive today, and count each morning that I awake as a miracle. Whenever I sit down to reflect about my life, I cannot help myself from looking back at the seventeen years I wasted in alcoholism and marijuana and feel a heavy bout of regret.

It all started after I completed my primary school education and joined Kanunga High School in Kiambu in 1996. In those days, boys who joined Form One were taken through a torturous initiation process into secondary school life by senior bullies. This is the same fate that befell me and other Form One students at Kanunga.

Older boys in the school would sneak in bhang and chang’aa illicit liquor. They would then subject us to drinking and smoking competitions at night over the weekends. In each of those smoking and drinking episodes, we were warned of dire consequences if we dared to report them to the school administration. We took comfort in the promise that the smoking and drinking would stop once we became regulars at the school.

By the time bullying of Form One students stopped during the second term, I had become hooked to bhang and chang’aa. I passed over my pocket money to the boys who led the group of bullies to be allowed into their group. The more chang’aa and bhang they sneaked into the school, the more I drank and smoked.

To avoid raising suspicions, we would schedule our drinking nights on weekends when we hardly went to class. We would buy a glass of chang’aa at Sh. 20 and a stick of marijuana at Sh. 10. But no matter how hard I tried to hide, the consequences of my actions kept popping up. I became unruly. My name featured in almost all cases of indiscipline. I would steal money to fund my drinking and smoking from other students whenever I exhausted my own pocket money.

By the time I moved to Form Three, I had started organizing strikes. I would often get suspended. My grades tanked. Thankfully, the teachers never got tired of me. They kept attempting to whip me back to the right path, mostly with little to no success. I was only lucky to make it to Form Four and sit my KCSE exams in 1999.

I became worse after leaving high school. My drinking, smoking of bhang, and unruly behavior deteriorated. I brought my family so much pain that they started asking God to take me. I had become a pain to myself and unto others, and in those dark days, it seemed like death was the only thing that would give my family peace.

I would sell whatever family property I came across, from chicken to cereals to fund my drinking and thirst for marijuana. When I lacked something to sell, I’d go to my drinking and smoking dens in Kirigiti and auction off my clothes, sometimes including the ones on me.

A few months after completing secondary school, my family enrolled me in a Kiambu computer college known as Multiface Computer College to train on computer applications. My family thought that this course would give me fresh purpose and divert my fondness for alcohol and drugs. But within weeks, my unruly drunkard behavior reared its ugly head again. I was dismissed before I could even complete half the course.

The college said that it could not tolerate the type of behavior I exhibited. I got a casual job with the Ministry of Public Works in Kiambu. This seemed like another fresh chance to redeem myself. But my throat scorched like dry earth.

And the desire to whet it down with alcohol stuck on me like white on rice. On payday, I ran off to a bar the moment I got my first salary of Sh. 12,500. Glass after glass, bottle after bottle, day after day I drank and smoked all the salary. I never went back to my job.

People said that I was lucky because despite my drunkenness, I always seemed to find myself a job, and people who wanted to help me get back on my feet again. Some even said that opportunities fall on the ungrateful and undeserving. It did not take long for this statement to manifest once again.

In July 2005, I got a job as an untrained biology teacher at a private secondary school in Kirigiti. I swore that I would try my best to keep this job. I would only drink on weekends. But as soon as I got my salary, I would find myself popping bottles to the last coin. I would turn up for work drunk.

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Sometimes, I would go to work with a 300ml liquor bottle tucked in my coat for 10am and lunch time drinking. I was dismissed from this job barely a term into the job. The school administration said that I was bad example to the students and they couldn’t tolerate alcoholism in a learning institution.

All this misfortune was truly depressing. In my sober days, I would see that I had become a problem to my family. I could feel that I had ruined my life. I wanted to change but I didn’t know how. To console myself, I always resulted to more and more alcohol. After losing my teaching job, I started working at construction sites. I would get paid Sh. 300 per day.

This amount was enough to sustain my drinking. Perhaps out of anger and frustration in life, I became violent. My old friends started avoiding me. My family members wouldn’t want to be seen with me. Most of my weekends were spent in police cells for drunkenness, disorderly, creating public disturbance, and damaging other people’s properties.

But not even police remand could stop me from drinking. By late 2007, my addiction had gotten so worse that my survival was hinged on alcohol. Withdrawal symptoms became intolerable. I would shake, sweat and hallucinate if I went for a few hours without a sip of alcohol.

I couldn’t lift a spoon of food to my mouth due to shaking. I tried to get saved and join a church but it didn’t work. That very Sunday evening, I would find myself searching for the nearest pub in town, sweat dripping down my forehead, my lips dry and cracked up. One morning, in April 2008, I decided to commit suicide. ‘I am useless in this world. Nobody loves. Nobody wants to be seen with me. I am a disappointment to my family. I’d rather die’, I told myself. I bought rat poison and planned to take it at night.

By God’s grace, a relative saw it and raised alarm. Later that year, my relatives saved me twice just at the nick of time after attempting suicide by hanging. Some would mock me that I was so spoilt that even death couldn’t accept me.

Heaven finally smiled on me in mid-2012 when I met my former secondary school teacher Catherine Gachutha. She was puzzled at how awful my life had turned out to be. But she was willing to listen to my story, even as I bubbled incoherently. She called my family and advised them to take me for treatment.

But no one wanted to hear about me. They flatly said that they couldn’t waste their money on me, and in fact were praying to God that I die because of all the things I had taken them through. Fortunately, a few weeks later, one of my sisters who lives in Canada agreed to pay Sh. 105,000 for my accommodation and treatment at the Karen Rehabilitation Centre.

After completing six months of rehabilitation, she enrolled me for a Diploma in Psychological counseling. In November 2014, I graduated. I followed this up with certification in drug addiction treatment and prevention, and a certificate as a trainer of trainees in the field of counseling and drug addiction. Today, I am also a member of the International Society of Substance Use Professionals, ISSUP.

I cannot find enough words to thank my sister for the mercy she showed me. I was a total mess, but she held a candle of hope for me and helped me get back on my feet. Were it not for her, I’d probably be dead today. Although I lost so many years wallowing in drugs and alcoholism, I am grateful that life gave me the ultimate chance to change my life.

Today, I am a husband and a father of two beautiful children. My hobbies changed from searching new drinking dens and drug hotspots to traveling for fun and swimming.

There are times when I’ve wished I could turn back the clock, but I have become content that this is my second chance in life, and what better way to ask for forgiveness than by helping a woman or man who is enslaved to alcohol and drugs just as I was! I may not be able to turn back the hands of time.

But I know that my experience can be a lesson, an encouragement to someone out there who’s on the verge of doing drugs, or who’s struggling to regain their life from the bondage of alcoholism. It is the little things that make life better, and this is my little thing.”