Till death do us part

Finally together; Hillary with his newly wed wife, Maria, last year.

By Billy Muiruri

“Are you serious that you really want to marry her? Do you know what you are getting yourself into?”

These were the questions Hillary Wasikenda was confronted with every time he came across people who had interacted with his girlfriend before him.

The young woman did not make things any easier for him either.

“I will never make the kind of woman you want in life. I cannot even carry a baby on my back. I am sick,” Maria Malaika always told him whenever the issue of a love relationship came up between them.

But that did not dampen Wasikenda’s desire to see the light-skinned, small-bodied girl from Luuya village in Bungoma grace his small house as the legally wedded wife.

By any social standards, it was true in the eyes of both family and friend that Malaika was not destined to be a mother, let alone conduct normal household chores.

Her family, seeing her grow as a fragile child always in and out of hospital knew that she would always live at home. She was too delicate for marriage, or so they thought.

It was not until 2002 when she was at the University of Nairobi, studying child psychology that Malaika was diagnosed with cardiac coronary, a heart illness that cardiologists described simply as “a hole in the heart”.

“I was a weakling all through my early childhood. Doctors had ruled out any task that would put me under any strain, no matter how small, so I never performed household chores” she says.

One year after the diagnosis and following medical counsel, the family had come to accept the reality that the girl would never have a family of her own.

When doctors advised that it was too risky for her to carry a baby to full-term, Malaika accepted the fact and started to buy teddy bears and treat them as her children.

“I had more than 10. Hope of ever having my own children had faded away,” she says.

Earlier in the day, he had met her as she hunted for a house because she wanted to move from where she was staying.

“I found her stunningly beautiful and immediately decided that I would pursue her and get to k now her better,” recounts Wasikenda.

“I asked her where she lived and she easily showed me the flat she was sharing with her younger sister in Upper Kabete,” he adds.

Overwhelmed by the feeling to totally own this beautiful woman ( regardless of whether she was already taken or not) Wasikenda asked his younger brother to accompany him to Malaika’s house.

Malaika was surprised to see them. “My sister encouraged me to allow them in,” she says. Malaika later made dinner for the two brothers, the first time she ever cooked ugali in her life.

Before they left, the two brothers learnt that the two girls also hailed from Bungoma, actually only 10 kilometres from their home.

When she welcomed Wasikenda into her house on October 31, 2005, little did Malaika know that he would be the person to change her life forever.

Even though Wasikenda was burning with love, he had lost the psyche to marry two years earlier when his marriage broke down. The experience left him feeling that he could not trust a woman again.

From their frequent visits, a close friendship developed which soon turned into love. But Wasikenda was to learn that the heaviest load Malaika could carry was 5 kilos.

She could not cook or even do most of the chores around the house.

“She kept saying to me that a Bukusu man (Wasikenda is a Bukusu) could not marry a weakling of a woman like herself but I assured her I loved her and would help her around the house,” he says.

Because of his determination to marry her, Wasikenda sought out Malaika’s cardiologist for more information about her condition. The doctor was concerned that I wanted to marry someone who was living on borrowed time.

“He told me as a young man with my whole future ahead of me, I did not need to get into a difficult marriage with my eyes wide open. He went ahead and enumerated several reasons why he thought I should reconsider marrying her,” he says.

If I insisted on marrying her, the cardiologist said, then I had to accept the fact that we could not have children of our own.

Wasikenda was adamant that he wanted a child with Malaika and pleaded with the doctor to do anything in his power to make carrying a baby successful for her.

“I was told she would need at least 18 months to be prepared for conception. I was also a cautioned against doing anything to annoy her as her blood pressure could rise to fatal levels,” says Wasikenda.

But the lovestruck man was not deterred. A few days later, when Malaika’s father came visiting, Wasikenda insisted on meeting him, much to her chagrin.

“He popped in and after a meal, he told him my father that he wanted to marry me. My father had never seen me with a man and I was so scared that I disappeared from the house,” she recollects.

Before the father could agree, he was keen to know if Wasikenda was aware about her health status. “If you can manage, we shall not block you,” the father said.

Wasikenda admits that even though he was in a hurry to settle down, he was financially crippled as he had just lost his job as a shop manager. Malaika was then teaching at a teachers college in Lavington.

In March 2006, after five months of wading through a love explosion in his heart, Wasikenda proposed to Malaika. “ I proposed and told her the wedding should be the following month,” he says.

Parents from both sides flatly rejected “the rush”. On this Malaika also felt ambushed. “The hurry was suffocating me. I was not prepared to move in as someone’s wife. At least not at such short notice,” she says.

Wasikenda had got a job two months earlier and felt capable of financing a wedding. After a lot of consultation, the wedding was pushed to August the same year.

But if the couple expected their road to matrimonial bliss to be smooth, they were in for a rude shock. The wedding slated for August 6 was not to be.

All preparations for the big day were complete by 8 am and the only thing remaining was for the groom to wait for the bride. But in a swift twist of fate, a police vehicle pulled into the venue and the groom was handed court papers.

It turned out that Wasikenda’s first wife had filed for and obtained orders stopping the wedding. She claimed she was his legal wife. As such, the wedding could not take place.

“I just signed the papers and relocated my guests to my house where we ate the food. 400 hundred guests had been invited. It was a very hard time for me but I sat there convinced I would win the case,” he says.

At this point, Malaika chips in. “He had told me about this woman and I agreed that I would not come between him and his children. I was not surprised as I was privy to the intrigues of the earlier marriage.”

The court case was grueling. For one and a half years, Wasikenda shunted between Nairobi to Bungoma to prove that he had not been legally married before. He finally won the battle on March 15, 2008.

As soon as the case was concluded, Malaika conceived. On Christmas day in 2008, she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. They named him Prince Fortune Mwambu.

With the legal intrigues out of the way, Wasikenda could now focus on the wedding he had to shelve. “I had promised Malaika that I would wed her. So I could not backtrack on this promise,” he says.

This time, however, he invited fewer guests and on November 7, last year, they wedded at the Consolata Shrine in Westlands.

Last week, the Saturday magazine team traced the couple to their home in Kinoo.

It was a cold afternoon and we found the couple in a jolly mood. Malaika is still on treatment for her condition but as she puts it, “ the love she has experienced from her man has made her stronger.”

She is still unable to perform most household chores so Wasikenda does most of it after work.

“We decided not to have a house help. Malaika stopped working in order to dedicate enough time to our son,” he explains.

As we chat, it starts to rain and Wasikenda goes to the kitchen to make us tea. We sip the beverage as young Prince slowly walks from one corner of the room to the other.

To the couple, this is the miracle baby who came along to complete their family.

bmuiruri@nation.co.ke

Source: Daily Nation