My dream job is transforming addicts

Elizabeth Koimet had seen a hard-working colleague lose job even as others languished in poverty after being sacked due to alcoholism.

Pushed by the unravelling disaster, she caught her colleagues and family off guard when she announced her plan to quit her high-paying job to start a rehabilitation centre.

“A big number of teachers were interdicted and eventually sacked due to addiction. No one seemed to offer help. Chasing them away gave them a better platform to drink themselves into a stupor leading to death,” said the former Teachers Service Commission deputy director, a place she had worked for over 10 years.

And in 2013, Ms Koimet turned her house in Nairobi into a rehab. She was embarking on a tough mission of tackling a scourge that continues to wreak havoc in many homes head on.

“I had a dream of transforming lives of drug addicts that cost jobs and lives and I’m happy I’m doing something to recover some of the condemned people,” she said.

AGGRESSIVE MARKETING

With her house turned into a rehab, Ms Koimet says she was not sure whether her husband would support her when she ushered in her first two clients, whom she counselled back into good life – single-handedly.

“At first, I was not sure how I would break the news to my husband. I started with two people, who stayed in my house in Nairobi, but I did not tell him at first as he was away on duty most of the times,” she told Money.

She says from her survey, the need for a rehab was so high, especially for professionals, who suffer silently since they are ashamed of disclosing their condition to anyone.

“My target group is professionals and I started off quietly with only a handful of contacts,” she adds.

When I finally told my husband that I wanted to resign from TSC to start a rehabilitation centre, I was shocked because he was in full support of the idea, she noted.

In 2013, Ms Koimet opened Serenity Rehabilitation Centre, in Lanet, Nakuru County, where she has employed a team of counsellors.

Ms Koimet pointed out that the most common form of drug addiction is alcohol and its enticing adverts on television and radio leave many with no choice but to seek the “joy of the imbibers.”

“Through research, I established that 90 per cent of the addicts started abusing drugs back in primary school and were introduced by friends or close family members,” she added.

At a fee of Sh2,000 per day, her rehab centres, Nairobi and Lanet, counsel alcohol addicts.

The process takes 90 days where one undergoes counselling and detoxification while users of hard drugs take up to six months. “Hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin take a long period to detoxify.”

FREE OF ADDICTIONS

In the course of rehabilitation, many addicts come out with skills since some of them either dropped out of college or secondary school.

“I introduced a system where we could equip them with skills such as hairdressing, making of food and beverages as well as computer skills,” she says.

At the moment, the centre has 29 patients, many of them youth from all over Kenya.

“We’ve also handled doctors, who suffer from drug addiction. This is basically the self-prescribed medicine while they are on duty,” she said.

Since the start of her rehab work, over 200 patients have successfully gone through the system and are now free from the various forms of addictions.

A recent survey by the National Authority for Campaign against Alcohol and Drug Abuse indicates that over 2.2 million Kenyans are addicted to alcohol and substance abuse. The survey suggests that substance abuse and addiction has a profound negative affect on the workplace.

This is in terms of decreased productivity and increased accidents, absenteeism, turnover, and medical costs.

This remains as major challenge as the number of alcohol and drug addicts rise with only four government rehabilitation centres in Kenya.