26-year-old Micah Oloo, the fifth born in a family of nine children, has seen and encountered everything that a man should have seen and encountered in his sunset years.
Oloo notes that he has lost count of the number of times he has slept hungry and how he has had to endure the pain of being broke.
The young man is the owner of Mike’s restaurant, a small hotel located off Makongeni road, behind Jamhuri Market. The hotel is usually a beehive of activities, with a bevy of customers cementing themselves on the available stools as others stand as Oloo serves them chips and a glass of juice one at a time.
"I dropped out of school due to fees related issues and I did odd jobs like cutting one full suck of grass for ten bob. Since this ten bob was not enough, I resulted to begging in the leafy suburbs of Ngoingwa,” says Oloo with a grin.
He reveals he ventured into the hotel business after he got tired of doing manual jobs for peanuts.
He chose the location of his restaurant which sits between two hotels, mainly to target touts who operate matatus to and from Kiganjo/Makongeni.
Oloo started as a fruit vendor before he began selling juice because not many people were buying the fruits.
“My customers found it expensive to eat a fruit like an apple for thirty bob. However, starting the juice making business was not easy because most of the touts used to drink the juice on credit and did not seem to care whether I was a greenhorn in the business or not,” he said.
Since the profit he got from selling juice was little, he decided to buy equipment for cooking chips after a sober observation that those around him had not ventured into the trade. He, however, was forced to close down the business after two weeks due to the expensive electricity and water bills.
After working as a bodaboda operator for eight months, he got a loan and hurriedly bought cheap kitchen apparatus and reopened his chips café.
“I also bought a sack of potatoes on the same day, peeled and cooked them at 4pm and by 5.30pm I had sold the entire batch,” he said.
The kitchen at Oloo's restaurant. [Source/ Micah Oloo]
He has one worker who helps him in chores and he hopes to expand his business soon to accommodate his increasing customers most of whom are college students from the neighbouring Mount Kenya University and Thika Technical College.
Oloo notes though the business has not been a walk in the park, he makes a profit of Sh30,000 in a good month.
The young entrepreneur urges his fellow youth to put in hard work in whatever they do, adding that everything is possible with the right attitude and endurance.
''Life had buttered me and poverty had embraced me tightly, but I came to learn that life is unfair to everyone. Your attitude and how you approach it are the determiners of your breakthrough," he said.
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