Dancan Odhiambo during the interview in Nyali /BRIAN OTENO

When he was forced to skip high school for more than nine months due to lack of tuition fees, Dancan Odhiambo’s future looked bleak.

Never, in his wildest dreams, would he have imagined that one day he would rub shoulders with the best architects in the world.

But unlike many others in his predicament, instead of complaining about his sad situation, Odhiambo took the lemons that life had given him and turned them into lemonade.

Determined to succeed despite obstacles, Odhiambo borrowed textbooks and studied at home, sometimes ahead of schedule.

When he returned to school during the third term of second grade at Kanga High School in Rongo, Migori County, the bright boy ranked among the top six in his class.

“The director then wanted me to start again from Formula 1. I refused. I maintained that I did well during the term and a half I spent at school before being sent home. “It took a lot of persuasion for him to allow me to move to Form 2 in the third term. He had set many conditions for me which I fortunately fulfilled. He was surprised,” he says.

Odhiambo is now an architect who has completed more than 450 projects in Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar and South Sudan.

He says Kenyan architects are mainly fighting fires instead of using architecture for socio-economic transformation.

If you asked him 30 years ago where he would be today, he wouldn’t have imagined himself designing and building iconic structures across borders.

Born and raised in Umoja 1 in Eastlands, Nairobi, and the fifth born in a family of seven children, Odhiambo says he enjoyed his childhood, more out of innocence than pleasure.

“I had a very interesting childhood. I can’t really say it was difficult because I really enjoyed it. At the time, in Eastlands, planning allowed for social interactions. “No apartments were built illegally. There were many playgrounds. You could see your neighbor at any time, which is not what we experience today,” he says.

However, he admits that going through Unity Primary was the hardest part of his life. It wasn’t easy for his parents to raise the school fees for all seven of them.

“My mother was a tailor. This is where I acquired my very modest skills in architecture. My father is a retired accountant who worked at Kenya Finespinners,” says Odhiambo.

He was not among the best students during his formative years because his parents were not very strict, probably because they had seven children and so there was no time to waste with a only child.

The social space then allowed the neighborhood children to play a lot.

However, his older brother, Fred, and his neighbor Steve Aduda, now a doctor, were different from the neighborhood kids, sparking his curiosity.

“While everyone else was playing and getting into all kinds of trouble, these two were still studying. Back then, in the Eastern Lands, there was petty crime and all sorts of things. Education has almost taken a back seat,” says Odhiambo.

He was caught between the two worlds, but then decided to join them and became something of a bookworm.

But when things became more difficult for the family, they moved to Migori County, their country home where he joined Bondo Nyironge Primary School.

From there, although his dream was to join Starehe Boys’ Centre, he had to settle for Kanga High School before things got harder and he had to drop out of school at the start of the second term of first grade. year.

At home, he did menial jobs while trying to raise money to pay expenses.

He also started buying corn in Migori and selling it in Isebania, while buying rice in Isebania and selling it in Migori.

“I did all kinds of work, including burning charcoal, to be able to increase my tuition fees and at the same time study at night using the nyangile (tin paraffin lamp). I was hopeful that I would return to school and complete my studies,” says Odhiambo.

His mother, seeing her son’s determination to succeed, decided to return to Nairobi to work. Back in Nairobi, where they have now settled in Kayole, they were introduced to a Catholic priest, Father Robert Vujs, an architect, who then intervened and offered to pay the remainder of the school fees for the rest of the year. Odhiambo secondary school.

“The principal of Kanga High School had insisted that we pay the full year’s tuition fees, both for the first and second year, before he could readmit me. I had refused to return to Formula 1. At that time, my mother had only increased the school fees for one year,” says Odhiambo.

Now that his fee was secure, another setback occurred. He started to become ill throughout Formulas 3 and 4.

“I coughed all the time and went home when it got too bad. My body swelled and I missed classes most of the time,” he says.

Because of his good performance, he was placed in a group whose teachers expected him to get an A in KCSE. “In Form 2, I was nicknamed Prof because I used to teach other students things taught in Form 3. I got an A in my KCSE exams and my name appeared in the newspapers among the best in the country.”

In order to give back to society and Father Vujs, he offered to wash the Donholm Catholic Church in Nairobi every Sunday after mass.

Although he applied to study medicine at university, he had to follow his passion and took architecture courses at the University of Nairobi.

“Beyond passion, I also had to honor Father Vujs who told me that I only had two options to pursue. He told me that I should become a priest or an architect,” says Odhiambo.

After his first degree, Odhiambo had the opportunity to go to the Cologne School of Design in Germany for an exchange program of around six months, courtesy of UoN and the Goethe Institute.

“It really shaped my architecture. The architecture in Germany opened my eyes. There, I saw some of the most beautiful architecture by the greatest architects in the world,” says Odhiambo.

The architect Buli Ladu, known as Odhiambo, also shaped it by linking it to the UN where he did his internship.

“I mention these people because they gave me a different perspective on architecture. Architecture is not just about designing and building structures. This should help improve the socio-economic and environmental growth of the country,” he said.

Odhiambo has employed many interns in his company, BioSystem Consultants, because he believes in the power of the internship.

He says his most iconic project is the Three Villa, a project he owns. He bought an abandoned private plot in Nyali, Mombasa, where people dumped their garbage.

“The promoter, because it was a career, couldn’t do anything with it. So my wife spotted it and told me she found a sloping spot with lots of wind. She didn’t tell me it was a career,” says Odhiambo.

“So when I went to look at the site, I was shocked. I didn’t understand why my wife wanted me to buy a quarry, which was a big drain. But she told me that she knew that I was an architect and that I could do something wonderful with the plot. “It challenged me and I also remembered that architecture is about solving problems using designs,” says Odhiambo.

The project, he says, is about how man and nature should coexist and how we travel through time. The project was featured in Construction Review, a prestigious architecture magazine, which published the site twice.