What does a VIP look like? Who is a VIP anyway? Is it someone with bodyguards or someone who walks with a cane and sunglasses?

When Oliver Wanjala was posted to the VIP parking gate of a 5-star hotel in

Westlands during his first week, he did what any young security officer might have done. He allowed every big car to park. Prado? V8? SUV? If it was big, he allowed it through.

Then the radio crackled.

“Delta Four… the VIP parking is full. Who have you been allowing in?”

“VIPs, sir. Over.”

The controller asked, “How did you know they were VIPs?”

“They had big cars, sir.”

The controller laughed.

Back then he was just a village boy trying to understand a world that seemed to have rules nobody had written down. His mother died when he was too young to remember her. His father had a large polygamous family; there were 27 children. You got lost in the numbers. It was his older stepbrother who paid his school fees, raised him and became the bridge between the life he had and the one he hoped for.

Today Oliver dreams of owning an Audi. Of moving his family to a better neighbourhood. Most of all, he dreams of repaying the people who carried him before he could carry himself.

Today he is an acting Site Supervisor. A husband. A father of a little girl named after the mother he never really knew.

He still tells the VIP story because it reminds him of who he was. A young man who thought importance arrived in a big car.

Life, it turns out, has introduced him to far more important people.