LIFE STORY
Paul Nyainda: A Seaman With a Passion Our Managing Editor George Sunguh talked to Paul Nyainda, one of the Kenyan youths working on board MSC Cruises and shares his story.
20
AFRICAN SHIPPING REVIEW July/Sept. 2020
A
man can desire a thing so deeply that he stakes his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it,” Napoleon Hills, an American Self-Help author wrote in his book: Think and Grow Rich,” Perhaps this is the tenacity that Paul Nyainda, a Kenyan Marine Engineer has clung on to nurse his childhood dream of becoming a sailor to come true. Paul, 28, today works as one of the Engine Cadet Officers onboard MSC Splendida, a luxurious passenger liner operated by Italy’s MSC Cruises. He is one of the Kenyan youths to benefit from the agreement signed between the Kenya government and the Geneva based Mediterranean Shipping
Company in August, 2018 to send at least 2000 young Kenyan seafarers to sea annually for the next five years. The fire in Paul to become a sailor was ignited at the tender age of seven while in class two at Nairobi's Lavington Primary School. He read a book titled: 'The Adventure of Tintin,' written by a Belgian cartoonist -Georges Remi which was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th Century. Paul was instantly inspired by the exploits of Captain Archibald Haddock, one of the fictional characters in the book, so much that he instantly wanted to be like this star.
