“Nobody prepared me for what happens after you get released from the hospital,” he said. “You go home, alone. You’re in a room with nothing to do. You are enclosed.”

Mr. Kimotho’s journey is not all sweat and pain. This is Kenya, after all, and thumping music is as vital to the mission as the endless cartons of bottled water. At times, his trek is more like a rolling street party. Of the 26 people in his entourage, there are rappers, dancers and D.J.’s who preside from two huge trucks. You can see heads bobbing and feel the bass from a quarter-mile away.

Mr. Kimotho, 44, was born in the central highlands outside Nairobi, the son of a farmer and a teacher. He had a dog named Michael and at an early age connected to animals.

“An animal is honest,” he said. “If they like you, they show it. If they’re cross, they show it.”

He won a coveted spot at the University of Nairobi to study veterinary medicine, worked for the government after graduating, got his own car and driver, and married his longtime girlfriend, Dorris. In 2001, they had a son, Daniel.

BUT then Mr. Kimotho’s luck turned, and a charmed life morphed into something different. Less than two years after Daniel’s birth, Dorris died, of a “short illness,” is all he would say.

In early January 2004, three thugs attacked him as he was trying to pull his car onto a highway. They yelled at him to get out of the car. When he reached over to unfasten his seat belt, a gunman shot him in the right shoulder.

The bullet sliced through Mr. Kimotho’s back, slammed into his vertebrae and blasted bone slivers into his spinal cord. But the doctors did not know all that at the time. They simply plucked out the bullet and sent him to another hospital in the back of a pickup. His spinal cord was compressed, jarred and damaged even further. For months, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He said the worst part was when his son visited the hospital for the first time and looked blankly at him, not realizing the man in bed was Dad.