It was nothing but jubilation for Saalim Abdalla, a Kibera youth who had resigned all his fate to an irate mob in his slum suburbs.
Abdalla painfully recounts the fateful events that landed him in police cells where he found his hope in life.
"I was brutally beaten. The mob sourced for it everywhere but by the time the crowd found it, police officers had already arrived and that is how I managed to escape the jaws of death," narrated Abdalla.
It was his proverbial fortieth day as a street thief and he had stolen cash to buy a dose of heroin that he had become addicted to. But this was not his first brush in the arms of death. During his days as a drug user, he had once been stabbed by a Somali trader and also witnessed his accomplice being shot dead by police along the city's Uhuru highway.
The recent mob incident became a life changer in his life. Having been saved by the police, an elite group of drug reform advocates visited him at the police cells. The group introduced and encouraged him to participate in a medically assisted therapy (MAT) programme meant to help him reduce drug dependence. He is now slowly recuperating at the Mathare clinic with other 338 heroin addicts who have since been enrolled free of charge to receive the reform therapy.
The reform programme is currently voluntary and those under treatment are given methadone for two years in a move meant to make the brain function as expected.