By Rhoda Mutuku
It is a sweltering afternoon in the port city of Mombasa, but Mcharazo garage in King’orani Majengo area is abuzz with activities.
Successive bangs, alongside nonstop humming of machines that come with sporadic flashes of welding sparks, curves out a picture of a busy mechanical premise.
“This is my workshop and it is what pays my bills…,” says Josphat Kitsao adding “I am also proud because I employed several youths dropped out of school and from this they now make ends meet.”
Jones Kimari, one of the employees at the mechanical shop rains accolades on Kitsao’s venture saying the business picked him up from rags.
“I did not do well in KCSE. I scored a D and I was so discouraged in life. I thought that was the end of me until I met Kitsao who absorbed me to train and finally work in his workshop. Today I am happy,” Kimari told the Plu in an interview.
As Kitsao relishes the fruits of his own efforts today, he remembers the challenging path he has gone through as he struggled to dislodge himself from what he says was a stubborn quagmire of poverty.
He recalls how his family endured rough times after his father was arrested in 1997, while he was only a 15-year-old class eight pupil at Miatsani primary school in Kwale County.
The arrest of his father appeared to dim his hopes for a bright future at once.
In what began as a war of words between his father and a friend, Kitsao’s father smacked his rival on the mouth resulting into a two year jail term leaving the family with no one to turn to.
Following arrest of the family’s sole breadwinner, Kitsao’s mother could not provide for her seven children with her meager income resulting from selling family cows for slaughter.
Kitsao who had at that time joined secondary school, but dropped out while in form two to assist her constantly ailing mother to provide for his siblings.
“Every time I saw my mother moving from one butchery to the next in the scorching sun, I was hurt because she was gradually giving in to depression and her body weakening as a result of the burden she had to bear in raising seven children,” he said.
The business would later collapse as accruing mountain of debts would render it unsustainable. Kitsao struggled with life for two years hawking along the streets of Mombasa selling bottled water.
Driven by his dream to be an engineer Kitsao decided that all was not lost when an opportunity to pursue motor vehicle mechanics presented itself through the Christian Industrial Training Centre (CITC), a Christian college at Buxton.
They say when life gives you a lemon you make lemonade and that’s exactly what Kitsao did to join CITC, a Christian institution which was considering Christian youths for the scholarship provided by some foreign missionaries who were in the country.
“I am a Muslim but I could not risk revealing my identity to the missionaries because they could not have accepted to enroll me since the program was empowerment for Christian youth, I needed a break through from my tough situation so I hid my identity and luckily I went through,” Kitsao said.
At the institution, he specialized in Gearbox and thereafter went for an internship at his friend’s Jingle Tours and Safaris workshop. Kitsao’s aggressiveness and passion saw him secure a job as a mechanic at a workshop.
Through his savings from the wages earned at his job, he says he went on to establish his mechanical workshop-Mcharazo in 2009, a shop he operates to date.
Kitsao is now a proud employer of ten employees at young and proud mechanical work, based in King’orani ; Mombasa, a merger formed between him and one of his employees who also established a mechanical workshop majoring on training class eight drop outs.
He proudly calls upon and urges persons interested in mechanics to join his workshop to get to achieve their desire through proper training.
“I train and absorb class eight drop outs because they have the potential and are determined to perform their work,” he said.
