On Eloloi Lowangore’s right shoulder is a detrimental scar that serves as a testimonial to the domestic abuse she agonizingly suffered in marital life. 

Despite being a teetotaller, her husband was caged in an intoxicating rage. Hot tempered and unpleasantly violent, he would throttle the life out of her at the slightest mishap. He modelled tree branches into canes for the specific purpose of whooping her whenever he felt the burdens of life crushing down on his shoulders. A construction worker, he would come back from his tedious job with the vein in his temple throbbing, his breath coming in short unregulated pants, and a boiling magma that seethed within him waiting to erupt. This cold implacable fury would then be unleashed on Eloloi’s innocent body.

Yet despite all this, she stuck with him and bore him a daughter. She expected carrying his seed and introducing a new life that possessed half his genes to soften him towards her but things only got worse. Eloloi persevered through the persecution of her grim faced, hate filled and humorless husband.

As her daughter grew, the snorting impatience of her husband peaked and without a warning, he abandoned them. Left to her own survival devices, Eloloi began conducting household chores for a fee. Not long after, her daughter joined her and together they held hands and channeled the divine feminine energy buried within them to power through life. 

Eloloi barricaded her heart with a love-repelling fence. The trauma from her first marriage persisted throughout her life. “I did not want any other man after him. I could not allow myself to suffer abuse anymore,” she said with conviction.

A man full of promise to be a better husband than her father managed to seduce Eloloi’s daughter into a marriage and she bore him a son. But like her father, her husband abandoned her under the guise of working in Nanyuki. But the fruits of his labor were never tasted let alone enjoyed.

Wallowing in abject poverty, Eloloi finds solace in catching up with her peers every evening, conversing on their frangible health and anticipating their inevitable death.