“I did not let failure get in my way”

At the small mabati gate of Shadow Mountain Children’s Home, which is in the heart of Baba Dogo slum, we are met by playful 22-month-old Ryan. Ryan, we are later told, is the baby of the family. The small compound is a flurry of activity – young children running around, older girls preparing sukuma wiki for dinner and older boys building a rabbit hatch.

“This is my everyday life,” says Hannah Wangari, who the 68 children who live here call Mum.

She is seated in a plastic chair outside, watching as the children go about their business. She seems at home, but the road to this level of content has been bumpy and winding. It started with an illness that struck when she was about two years old and saw her spend the next eight years at the Mathari Mission Hospital in Nyeri.

“My parents could not afford the Sh750 hospital bill so I was detained for eight years,” she recalls. She came home to find that her parents had split. This meant that for the rest of her childhood and her teenage years, she was shuttled from this home to the other. 

“There wasn’t really much resources to go around. An aunt who took me in is the one who paid for my secondary school fees. I learnt to work for money when I was in my teens,” she says.

All along, Hannah had just one dream – to become a teacher. Still, in her then reality, this dream seemed too big. The teachers she saw in her neighbourhood all seemed to have an array of expensive looking clothes and shoes, something she didn’t think that she could have.

Still, she worked. After secondary school, she did many jobs including selling vegetables at a marketplace, working as a house girl and then as support staff in a primary school before finally being admitted to the then Nairobi Teacher’s Centre to study teaching.

RESCUE HOME

“Graduating from college and landing a job as a teacher was a dream come true for me,” she says. Very quickly, the little broken pieces of her life came together. In 1997, she began her own school, Kids Square Academy in Satellite, Nairobi.

“The community fell in love with me. In just a few years, I had full classrooms, cars and school vans,” she recalls. Then, just as quickly as it had grown, it all came tumbling down. The year was 2010.

“There were ownership wrangles regarding the land on which the school stood and we were evicted one Saturday morning just before schools opened that Monday.” With no time to relocate the school, it was closed. What Hannah remembers about this period was the shame she felt for losing it all. Now that there was no money coming in, they began losing their assets.

“The thought of going to the schools around to ask for a job as a teacher was too shameful so I packed up and moved to Githurai to start over.”

Here, for the second time, she attempted to set up another school. Luck was not on her side. Two years in, she had just 12 pupils. Also, she was felt very unsettled. Teaching was no longer her passion. So she took a two year break to soul search, pray and find herself.

The idea came to her in the form of a desperate young single mother on a suicide mission. When Hannah met this young woman, she knew that she had to help. And since she knew she couldn’t permanently house her, she thought of setting up a home to rescue children. She set up the children’s home in April 2015 and the young woman she rescued became the matron.

Two years in, she has 68 children between the ages of 22 months and 17 years under her care. The home also includes a school so she gets to put her teaching skills and the furniture she had bought for her last school to good use. Besides the 68, Hannah has three biological children.

“It’s tough having all these children looking up to you for everything but I am now at peace. I know I am doing what I should be doing,” she says.

Her husband, Shem Sarangutu who we meet during the interview, agrees that his wife has found her calling here. “She got the call and I have embraced it.

I am a counsellor by profession and so I help re-organise the minds of the children who come in. A lot of them have very sad stories,” he says.