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Dogo Khan and Shabana Hardware- a little man with a big heart

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Published on Tuesday, 05 June 2007 20:34
Opposite the Kisii District General Hospital, stands what is reputedly the most expensive hardware store in the town. Yet, Shabana Hardware is never short of customers because the residents say they know where the profits go. From the store's first floor window, one can see down on the street below, two bicycles – one with a small coffin strapped on the carrier and the other bearing a distraught mother. Curious onlookers stare in silence and shed a sympathetic tear as the riders pass the hospital gate, their legs pumping down the pedals. Seeing this, Dogo Khan is energised into action. He leaves his office on the first floor and bounds down the stairs to the cortege outside.

For a month, the child's body has lain in the mortuary as his mother sought means to transport it home. Two sympathetic clansmen offered to ride the 60 kilometres from Mawego in Nyando District and return with the body, the mother explains tearfully. Burying in cemeteries is not a choice for people in Kisii, where the people believe that a dead person's spirit should rest in the homestead, in the bosom of family. Dogo offers them the use of one of his vehicles to take them to their destination. For him, gestures like this are second to his nature. He has tasted the salty life of poverty and want, and tries to ease other people's pain whenever he sees it.

The loss of his father when he was only two, and the death of his mother when he stood on the brink of adulthood at 18 have shaped his character. Dogo knows the pain of loss, the hopelessness of poverty and the suffering that comes to humankind. "I didn't grow up in plenty," he recalls. "Growing up without a father is a challenge, especially when your mother is not working. Sometimes I would be sent away from school for fees. My uncles would assist but they had their own families and anyway they were not rich. It was tough," he remembers it clearly, even though he was the youngest of the four children.

A few weeks ago, when a child was trapped in a burning house, the wind fanning the raging flames, people watched the destruction helplessly from a distance. But Dogo pushed them aside and scaled the wall into the smoky room where the little boy was huddled in a corner, waiting for death. In a moment, Dogo appeared at the window, the child on his back, and climbed down the wall to safety, the spectators watching with bated breath. "I always get touched when I see tragic situations and want to do something to help people," says Dogo. Few people know his real first name, Vilayat. He earned the nickname Dogo when he was a student at Kisumu Boys in 1968, for his diminutive size. He resisted the name for a while, but later adopted it, and now everyone calls him by it.

After his father's death, the family moved from their home in Nyamira to Migori to stay with relatives. But fate was to deal the family an even heavier blow when Dogo's mother was diagnosed with a heart condition in 1971 and needed urgent surgery at The Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi. "We practically begged for money. Raising the Sh5,000 fee needed then was not an easy task." The operation was successful but she died two years later, not living long enough to see her youngest child get his own four children – Nyaboke, 16, Mogaka, 14, Moraa, 11, and five-year-old Kemunto.

Her death, however, strengthened the young man's resolve to help those in need. At the hardware store, with its 100-odd employees, 40 workers have hearing disabilities while five – among them the chief accountant – are lame. Sign language is in common usage at work, although it certainly is not always conventional. Some of the signs used have been devised in the work environment and only serve the workers to understand one another. "I believe everyone has to earn a living," the 48-year-old Dogo says as his eyes shift from the calendar with holy Arabic writings, to his expansive table, then back to the wall with a time-table of World Cup fixtures. He glances up at the man standing next to his desk, paper in hand. He cannot hear, so Dogo reads his face, takes the paper and signs it, and then he is on his way.

His vision is to see his fellow Kenyans access medical care without difficulty, "where our children go to schools of their choice, where everyone is accepted despite their disability." He has seen sick people walk long distances in search of treatment because they have no bus fare. "Sometimes I watch television and I get so depressed that I feel like switching it off. The kind of suffering people undergo is really unbearable." Dogo helps where he can. If one asks him why he does it, he answers that everyone who is able should assist those in need. "I give just a small token where I can." That small token includes supplying patients at the Kisii District General Hospital with clean boiled water. The hospital has not had tapped water for some time. The water is boiled at the hardware store by a worker before it is cooled and poured into a big tank at the hospital.

The man given this task ensures the tank is replenished throughout the day, and that the used glasses are collected and cleaned before they are returned for re-use. His generosity has won admirers in his home town as well as in other parts of Kenya. Margaret Apwoya, the woman with a rare breast growth disease who underwent a successful operation at Eldoret's Moi Referral and Teaching Hospital last year, sent someone to personally thank Dogo for his contribution to her medical bill. "I was touched by her gesture. It's good when people appreciate your little contribution." His tribesmen believe Dogo is capable of anything. They will call him first in case of a road accident, fire, a trapped person, any tragedy. And he has never let them down. "When we lost 14 relatives in an accident a few years back, Dogo really assisted us. He bought all the coffins and gave us money to meet funeral expenses. It was as if he was personally bereaved," says Marita Nyasuguta of Suneka.

Besides philanthropy, Dogo's other love is football. It made him start his own club, Shabana FC, a name he coined in the early 1980s. The club was started as an avenue for sports pastime for the hardware staff but later incorporated a youth team, Kisii Olympic Club and grew into a professional team. Dogo has given to society and, in turn, has received from it abundantly. He is a nominated councillor to the Kisii Municipal Council. Despite his being of Asian extraction, his darker tribesmen have never seen him as being different from themselves. He is a tribesman born in Bonyunyu, Nyamira District.

One would be tempted to think that his generosity is an investment into a future political career, but Dogo is quick to dismiss such suspicions. "I have no ambition of becoming a politician. I am a businessman and that is all I want to be." In his business, he follows regulations by paying the prescribed value added tax, and explains his prices thus: "I pay nearly Sh1 million in VAT to the government every month. I can't sell my goods without charging VAT." Those who buy from him say that because they see how his proceeds are used – contributing to the community's welfare and keeping his staff in employment – the sacrifice is worthwhile. For now, though, business is bad and Dogo fears that if the trend continues, he and his three partners might abandon the hardware venture all together and start a different business.

As he gazes through the window down on the road below, images are forming in his mind of building a children's home and orphanage for Aids orphans one day.