Agony as disabled woman’s only daughters drown

By Maureen Odiwuor

Seated outside her house, the elderly disabled woman stares blankly in the horizon looking disturbed. Joyce Omedo is deep in thoughts as tears flow freely from her eyes.

“I have lost everything that life had offered me, everything that brought joy and happiness to my life,” she laments.

While the country was celebrating the 49th Madaraka Day, the disabled woman lost her two daughters. They drowned at a water pan in Obago village, Miwani Division of Kisumu County. They were her only children.

The girls, Keziah Atieno, 19, and Rose Olang’, 18, drowned when they went to bathe at the banks of the pan created by the waters of Nyando River after flooding.

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Atieno had just completed form four and was currently teaching at Nyarendo Primary School as an untrained teacher. She left behind a daughter aged three years. Omedo recalls how she got information that her daughters had drowned.

She says she was seated in her compound in Nyarendo Village as was routine since she could not walk, when a neighbour’s son approached looking distressed.

“I asked him what the problem was but he did not utter a word until 30 minutes later when unexpectedly he broke the news and left immediately,” recalls Omedo.

She says the news hit her hard adding she does not recall what happened immediately after that as she collapsed and lost consciousness.

When she regained consciousness, she says, she started crawling towards the farm in the neighbouring Obago Village, about three kilometres from their house.

She intended to go to the place where her daughters and three other relatives had gone to work that morning.