For many girls, getting proposed to and eventual marriage comes to fruition as a long fairy tale that in most cases involves candle lit dinners in well thought exotic locations.
For Kenyan actress Faith Musikoyo, 28, however, her engagement was to a stranger, in a public service bus and what unfolded later proved how haphazard a decision that was.
In a sit down with The Standard, Musikoyo, who comes from Mumias, revealed that the proposal came at a time she had nowhere to go and with very few possessions to her name.
She had just fallen out with her parents when she decided to board a Nairobi-bound bus with zero knowledge of the city or where to get accommodation.
Luckily enough, a man identified as John who sat next to her offered to marry her shortly after they had known each other for a few hours.
Musikoyo, who is an actress at Shoeback Media, was desperate at the time and offered to move in with him. She had only known that he was a construction worker.
"When John expressed interest in me, I was elated not because I had developed feelings for him in the few hours I knew him on that bus. In fact, I wasn't ready for marriage. I just knew I would have a place to call home and that was enough for me at that time," Musikoyo revealed.
She would often visit John's relatives but no one mentioned to her that he had another family. He even offered to take her to journalism school.
After she settled in college, she narrated that the true colours of John appeared and he started abusing her sexually.
"He was a control freak and very insecure. He was totally against the idea of me going to school. He banned me from communicating with my friends, both male and female and smashed my phone three times when he caught me chatting with them. At some point, he locked me in the house for several days and I started having convulsions because of the emotional turmoil he subjected me to," she narrated.
They got three children together but two of them passed on.
As ridiculous as that may sound, it was not the first marriage she had gotten into in order to gain basic needs.
In the first instance, Musikoyo had fled from her home to escape her father's constant wrangles with his four wives that often turned into fights.
She went to Nairobi to live with her aunt but the house was too small to accommodate a family of six. That was when she moved in with a boy she had known while she was still in high school.
"Sometimes I looked at him as a brother. He was also my friend but we also started sleeping together. It was hard to define the nature of our relationship. When we decided to look for a single room where we would share the Ksh1,000 rent, we also continued sleeping together until we all lost our jobs," she narrated.
The two then parted ways after they became homeless.
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