When Gladys Wanja left her flourishing salon business for a dirty job of emptying school toilets all her friends thought she was going crazy.
With determination and wanting to explore the unexploited opportunity Wanja is now minting millions in her venture.
'Whats goes in through our mouth as food is later excreted, I find pleasure emptying school toilets," said Wanja when we met her at Muthambi girls with her team of more than five women.
35 year old Wanja, is a Co-director of a exhaustion and fumigation company.
When we met her she was in a dirty, soaked overall and dirty gumboots. She said many people find it anomalous when she decided to close down her salon business and join her husband in unblocking and emptying sewerage lines, septic and pit latrines in learning and other institutions.
Wanja and her husband, Charles Mureithi, move around schools with a team of more than ten people.
Armed with an exhauster pump and basins, donning tight overalls and gumboots Wanja leads the team.
Wanja said that being a Co-director does not stop her from doing the dirty work.
"I don't sit here or move around ordering my employees to work because I pay them. I lead from the front, I enter into the latrines with a basin and empty them," she said.
Wanja abamdoned and closed down her saloon business two years after her husband had left his accountancy job to venture into 'emptying toilets.'
She revealed how her husband's earnings had skyrocketed within a very short period of time such that she started admiring his venture.
"His lifestyle was changing so fast, he was able to turn our home into a better place and he seemed to make lots of money," said Wanja.
She officially joined her husband in 2016, since then she has been walking the journey with him.
When business is booming, they share responsibilities and decide who goes where and when.
Wanja has now recruited five women into the business.
"I have invited, recruited and employed my fellow women into this venture to prove that what men can do, women can also do," she said.
She said to make their working environment more favorable they buy different types of chemicals to treat the waste before they start extracting. The chemicals are used to treat the gas in the latrines.
Charles Mureithi, her husband, welcomed her into the business but never thought she would adopt so fast.
"We now work together in all projects and businesses that we get, people now call us Wacioro," said Mureithi.
