No word after she left with Swiss boyfriend 40 years ago

A photo of Selly Chepng'eno Barimen.She went to left the country with his Swiss boyfriend to Switzerland in 1975 and the letter she sent to his brother two months after she flew out,was the last communication her family got from her.PHOTO By KIPSANG JOSEPH.

Nairobi; Kenya: It was joy and celebration at a party to bid farewell to their daughter who was departing to a foreign land with her Swiss boyfriend but 40 years down the line, family and friends are yet to hear from her. It was 1975 and Selly Chepng’eno Barimen from Sugurek village in Bomet County had just finished Form Four at the nearby Kipsigis Girls’ high school. She went to Kisumu in search of employment and met a Swiss man and they fell in love.

According to her brother Stanley Chepkwony who is now 59, Selly, who was then 24 was excited and looked forward to a good life in Switzerland.

“She was our firstborn. I was in Form One when she told our parents that she was planning to move to Switzerland with her boyfriend. She promised to bring him home, which she did, but it was the last time we saw her,” narrated Chepkwony.

lost letter

Her parents who were optimistic that their daughter would come back to visit them, gave their blessings for her to go with the man they only knew as SS Gill. A letter she sent to her brother two months later confirmed that she has arrived safely and was settling in well.
“I was in Form One when I received a letter from Selly, informing me that they arrived safely and that she had joined a nursing college in Zurich. That was the first and the last communication we received from her,” said Chepkwony.
If he knew it would be the last communication, Chepkwony would have guarded the letter with his life, as it would have been a crucial lead to tracing her.
Selly left when six of her 13 siblings had not been born and her parents have since died. The family has lived with the agony of unanswered questions such as whether their daughter is alive or dead, whether or not she got married and if she has children.
Given that there were no mobile phones, emails and the social media then, communication was limited to letters. The lost letter would have provided Selly’s physical address and without it, the family had no other way of tracing her.
Being the only educated member of the family Chepkwony made several attempts to retrace his sister’s footsteps to no avail.

“I went to Interpol in Kisumu in 1995 to trace the travel documents from the Immigration department but when I told them my sister left in 1975, they were astonished, saying none of them were born by then and that the files had disappeared,” he said.

 In 2004, Chepkwony placed an announcement in The Standard newspaper, hoping that the family would receive valuable information that could lead to him finding his sister but he got no response.

He adds that the family’s efforts to seek help from elected leaders in successive Governments have borne no fruit.

The family is now appealing to the Government through the Immigration department and relevant embassies to help them trace their kin and if possible bring her home as they have exhausted every possible channel of finding her amid financial constraints.