A baby boy, born with a deformed face and a cleft palate at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital, who died last week after being abandoned by his parents is yet to be buried.
Stephen Baraka experienced more cruelty in his short life than many adults ever will after he was abandoned at the facility on May 12, 2016 while just six months old.
Baraka did not receive medical treatment because the doctors were on strike and had to live through yet another harrowing ordeal when nurses also embarked on a long work boycott over salaries.
The boy, who became the face of the health workers' strike, was found in the ward alone. Other patients had been withdrawn by their relatives due to lack of services.
The medics stayed away for 250 days collectively and the hospital remained Baraka's home until he died last week from what doctors said were respiratory complications.
But misfortune has followed the child even in death - there is no one to bury him as no one has come to claim his body.
Managers at the facility tried in vain to trace his parents to facilitate referral to another hospital that could handle his case.
"He was meant to be examined by a consultant a day after he was admitted. But what shocked us was the people said to be his parents had disappeared. The phone numbers they gave were not going through," said Kevin Ooro, a social health worker at the hospital.
Mr Ooro said their investigations showed Baraka's parents may have come from Luanda in Vihiga County.
Well-wishers are willing to bury the child but the hospital says this would be illegal. The body will remain in the mortuary while the hospital staff try to find the parents.
“We cannot release the body. For all the time the baby has been in the hospital, nobody claimed him. The body will remain in our custody; it belongs to the State,” said Juliana Otieno, the hospital CEO.
