A festival of decent indulgence involving escorting newlyweds to their homes with chirpy singing and dancing was prevalent during Mwanaidi Indosio’s early teen years. As she enjoyed partaking in this ceremony of interconnecting souls in holy matrimony, her innocent charm elicited a powerful wind of deep emotion in a locomotive operator. He was utterly entranced by her and without delay, he proposed to her. 

The catalytic love that began budding in her heart drove her to show commitment to him by converting to his Islamic creed. Together they solidified their union and through their humble means, they formed a family with four children. Indosio derived a jaunty feeling from fixating on her efforts into making her home a place of ease and rest. She performed all domestic duties and ensured her husband and children lived in comfort. This prototypical life of a nuclear family’s home was disrupted when two of her children and her husband became engulfed by the dark shadow of death. 

Indosio was confronted by profuse loneliness and an urgency to create a system of sustenance. With little time to embody the death of her loved ones, Indosio had to devise a way to seal the financial fissures caused by the absence of her husband. This drove her to puncture the facade of a timid housewife and unleash the true nature of a woman capable of independence. 

She would source charcoal from the reserve and rural regions. The economies of her trade involved buying a sack for ksh. 1,300 and packaging it in two ways: a small can or a mid-sized bucket. Out of this one sack she made a profit of ksh.200. With age serving her a swollen knee and poor eyesight, Indosio’s productivity has been notably redacted. She packages her charcoal as she waits for customers to come to her. Indosio has developed a vividly drab perspective on elderly life. “There is no zeal in old age. All you think about is death,” the 78-year-old gloomily said.