I come from a very humble background and grew up in a very strict Catholic family where my family had to attend church every Sunday morning and most mornings at the local Catholic run primary school somewhere on the outskirts of Nairobi.
My dad was a hopeless drunk then and save for our mum holding the family together,im sure me and my siblings would have struggled to make it in life.
My mum taught us from a very tender age to pray the Novena.
It involved kneeling down every evening before dad came back home drank and reciting this prayer 9 times for 9 days in a row.
It was then expected that your prayer would be answered on the ninth day , whatever you had prayed for.
My mom had always led us to believe that we were praying for the healing of our dad from drunkenness,womanising and the general squander of his income which was leaving our family on the verge of lacking basic needs like food and tuition fees.
Things got so bad and I remember me and my older brother deciding that we would do something to ease the financial strain that my mom had to go through every month while dad drunk and wasted all his money on drink and other women!
Me and my bro saw a niche in the ice pop business at our local church!
It wasn’t difficult convincing mum to help us buy the polythene tubes,colour dyes and flavourings that are the main Ingredients in making ice pops.
So end month when she got paid we went to Eabrahims supermarket hapo Kenya power near Gill house and I remember it was a Saturday and we couldn’t wait to get home to make the ice pops, freeze them and test the market that Sunday morning!
At least we had a working fridge!.. kikiki
Anyway; it was all try and error and I remember me and my brother spending most of the evening doing up all the different colours, pouring the mixture into the plastic bags and then using a burning candle to seal them before freezing them hoping that they would be frozen the next day!
My mom appreciated and supported us but I could tell that she was uneasy about what our drunk dad might make of us standing outside the church selling ice pops!
But me and my bro were determined and we even promised mom that if we sold any of the ice pops,she wouldn’t have to worry about getting us bustard and tuition money and so she would concentrate on paying school fees for our eldest siblings who were in High School!
Mum agreed and as we placed the last tubes into the freezer, she reminded us that that very night was the Ninth day of our nine days Novena to ST JUde so shall we gather and pray before we went to bed.
It should have been just another routine bedtime prayer but that night I really prayed that our ice pops would be frozen solid by the time we got up and that by the grace of God through St Jude,. May we at least sell enough to recoup mum’s money that she had invested and entrusted in us.
The plan was that my older brother would attend the First mass and that I would attend the second mass early enough for me to deliver the ice pops in time for him to sell them to the people leaving the first mass.
I would then attend second mass (to meet the rules) and would later join him in selling the rest of the remaining merchandise!
Here is the Miracle bit of this Hekaya.
Out of anticipation, I couldn’t sit through the “matangazo” part and when I rushed out to find out how my brother was doing, he excitedly showed me an almost empty bucket where there had been almost 100 ice pops and so he tasked me with rushing home to bring the rest of the ice pops before the service was over!
I emptied the freezer compartment and rushed back to the church gates just before the crowds dwindled!
That first day only; we made 207 shillings!
Enough to pay for our busfare and tuition fees for the next two weeks plus enough to buy a freezer bucket,colourings, flavours etc for the following week!
This small business continued to sustain me and my older brother’s primary education for almost the next two years and I sincerely believe that it was through the power of St. Jude’s Novena that it was all possible!
Watu hutoka mbali!
