The problem was that the office job she had taken was with a company that did not seem to care for what she loved.
Despite concerns, Ms Omido continued working for the company and in 2010, her two-year-old son fell ill. He underwent treatments and tests, but he did not get better and the problem could not be identified.
Things got so bad that he was admitted to hospital and it was then that a friend suggested that the child should be tested for lead poisoning.
It turned out he had dangerously high levels of lead in his blood.
The discovery that her son had lead poisoning—perhaps ingested from breastmilk shocked her.
Omido was angry. She quit her job, while pushing for the company to pay for her son’s treatment.
She also had tests done on three other children from the community. Her fears were confirmed.
‘You’re making it up’
Armed with the test results, Omido started writing to government agencies seeking action to stop the pollution. They ignored her, she says.
“The National Environmental Management Authority (Nema), in fact wrote back to me and said what I was saying was fictitious and they were ready to defend it in a court of law”, she told the BBC.
Nema had been partly responsible for licensing the factory in the first place.
She wanted to prove that it was no fiction so with funding from an environmental organisation, she organised for more lead poisoning tests to be done.
Omido then felt she had the evidence, but her determination to make her case led to frequent run-ins with the authorities.
“I just took it a day at a time. We were just depending on goodwill. When I was arrested for instance, I didn’t even have money for bail. And I had 17 people to bail out,” she says.
She was detained for one night in 2012 and charged with inciting violence after organising a march in Mombasa.
Two legal charities, Front Line Defenders and the East African Law Society, helped with the money and defence. The campaigners were acquitted because of a lack of evidence.
Omido considers the years before 2014 as “a very difficult time” when she almost gave up the fight.