Agony for families with children who disappeared

By Lilian Aluanga- Delvaux

NAIROBI, KENYA: For Mr Juma Karafuu and Ms Esther Kivagara, February 28 will remain etched in their memories forever after their daughter, Gloria Mbone, went missing.

Equally upset by events of that day is Mr Isaac Kivagara, Esther’s father, following the disappearance of the girl from the family’s Eldoret home. Kivagara is distraught as he narrates events leading to his grandchild’s disappearance to a Children’s officer at the Nairobi Children’s Home.

He describes Mbone as a bubbly, dark complexioned girl who speaks fluent Kiswahili, and wonders aloud why anyone would single her out in a group of children. The girl was the first born in a family of three.

“What bothers me is what motive whoever took Mbone had, and whether she is alright,” he says. It has taken Kivagara, a resident of Chamakanga location, Sabatia constituency, Western Kenya, almost a month to get to the Children’s home in Lower Kabete.

“It took me time to raise enough money to travel to Nairobi,” he says.

Kivagara says an announcement over the radio about lost children that were housed at the Home prompted him to travel to the city.

On the day she vanished, Mbone had walked home for lunch and later returned to school. But when the five-year-old’s mother went to pick her from school later in the afternoon, Mbone’s friend told her another woman had already picked the girl.

“The woman told my granddaughter that the family had moved and she had been sent by the girl’s parents to take her to their new house,” says Kivagara. About a month earlier Mbone’s family had moved, a factor he says makes them question how a stranger could have known such details.

Unclaimed

“We often get such visits,” says Njoki Munuhe, a Children’s’ officer who has been working at the Home for five years. While Mbone is yet to be traced, dozens of children at the Home, where some have stayed for over two years, remain unclaimed.

Currently there are at least 29 children at the Nairobi Children’s Home waiting to be reunited with their families. Of this number, 23 are boys, confirming what Munuhe says is a trend witnessed in cases of children reported as lost or missing.

“Boys usually account for a higher number than girls for reasons we still don’t know,” she says. Although the Home has a capacity of between 50 and 60 children, it was at one time forced to accommodate 150 children during the 2007/2008 post-election violence, when many children were separated from their families.

Kivagara asks Munuhe if the Home has received any child matching Mbone’s description. The Children’s officer answers in the negative. The elderly man then asks to see all the children gathered in the dining hall for a mid-morning snack. This search also fails to yield a familiar face.

While visits to the home sometimes lead to tearful reunions between ‘missing’ children and their parents, children like Peter Mwendwa, 7, are still waiting for the day when someone will walk into the centre to claim them. He has speech difficulties and has been at the home since January last year.

Communication

Mwendwa is a special needs child picked from the Machakos Country Bus station in Nairobi and taken to the Kamukunji Police Station by a good Samaritan. Then there is John, who was found at Baraka, near Mowlem area in Nairobi.

Although five-year-old John has been at the Kabete Home since 2011, his record falls short of the centre’s ‘oldest’ resident — Bill, aged six and another special needs child living at the Home since 2008.

“There is a high possibility that children with special needs that end up here did not actually get lost but could have been abandoned,” says Munuhe.

But there have been times when such cases have had a happy ending. An example was in 2012 when a special needs boy was reunited with his mother who traced him to the home. “The child simply wandered off and the mother had been looking for him,” says Munuhe.

Mr Charles Maina, a Child protection officer at the Nairobi Children’s Remand Home refers to children with special needs as those that lack communication (they can neither talk nor respond to verbal or non verbal communication) and social skills.

“Such children do not initiate contact and keep to themselves. They also lack self-awareness and are generally underdeveloped in terms of self-grooming,” he says. This, he says, complicates the process of piecing together information that can be used to trace the child’s family. Although the Remand Home’s statutory task is to provide custody to suspected child offenders and temporary custody to children in need of care and protection, it also has some ‘lost’ children under its care.

According to Munuhe many children received at the Nairobi Children’s Home are from lower income areas, with Machakos Country Bus station in Nairobi accounting for one of the spots where many lost children are picked from. In January, at least 13 children picked from the terminus were taken in by the Home, but majority have since been reunited with their families.