Are you often an ATM in an emergency?

Dr Moraa drove in to the compound in her KES1.6M second hand Toyota and stepped out. Moraa is a frontline worker at the national teaching and referral hospital, KNH in these challenging times. Dressed smartly she settled down at the Nairobi suburban convenience store/café with a Capuccino in front of her. Onions sell at KES 500 a Kilogramme here but customers are buying convenience and that comes at a premium. 

We maintained a social distance of sorts. I asked “You must be busy”. Moraa replied “The benches at KNH casualty are empty. Most of the cases we see are battered women at the receiving end of domestic violence which seems to be on the rise at this time.” I quipped “The experience at KNH is replicated across private clinics and hospitals across the land. Maybe the economy is doing so poorly that folks do not have any disposable income to attend to health matters”.

We went on to make additional small talk about some of the folks in the café who had high end radios and packed guns. She said “ I call these guys Interpol agents. They all walk with a swagger”. Many of them had bought Pizzas and ducked into their SUV’s in a hurry. The curfew hour was a scant fifteen minutes away

I then came to the business of the day. ”As a Doctor, how many financial emergencies do you deal with from relatives?” She replied, while toying with the handle of her empty coffee mug “I am overwhelmed, every week I get about 5 requests from my home area for cash , in this season”. I swung in “Do you have an Emergency Fund?”. The answer was pretty quick “What is that?” I went into the details and suggested she set up an emergency fund equivalent to eight times her monthly household expenses. She added “Where do I start raising such a colossal amount of money?”. “You could start with as little as KES 1000” I replied.

“Is this a typical Doctor?”, I couldn’t help asking myself. She had taken an emergency loan a few months ago in order to top up for purchase of her Toyota from what she realized from selling her old car. She was paying a mortgage. Moraa had two Life Insurance policies and an Education policy for her son in Form 2 in a public school. For now there were no school fees to be paid. Clearly she was overstretched financially and had borrowed heavily.

As the sun set on our conversation and we headed our separate ways she promised to contact me in a weeks time to start the process of setting up an emergency fund. And it only takes KES 1000 to start.