I’m looking for my mummy - ‘Mombasa Raha’ girl

Naomi Vugutsa is in emotional tatters after a two year search for her mother yielded no clues.

The 22-year-old neither knows her mother’s name nor how she looks like. The source of her frustration is  the so called ‘Mombasa Raha’ encounter between her late father, Thomas Anusu Silingi, and her mother. 

Silingi worked with Telkom Kenya in Mombasa and is said to have lived with Naomi’s mother, a Taita woman, at Beersheba in Kisauni sub county in the early 1990s in a ‘come- we-stay’ union, but never took her to his rural home in Mutirithia in Molo, Nakuru County.

When the arrangement collapsed, Silingi took Naomi, then aged two year and handed her to his mother, Sarah Doris Vutagwa in Molo.

Silingi died in Mombasa in 2002. He was buried in Molo. The identity of Naomi’s mother remained a secret.  Naomi’s grandma died in 2009. She was in Form Two. “I have had problems in school when asked for the name of my mother. I would resort to my grandmother’s name because I truly don’t know my mother by name.

It has been hurting to discuss mothers with my peers. It also had negative effects on my education,” says Naomi whose education was through Afya Plus, an NGO. She managed a C score in the 2011 Kenya   KCSE exams.

Naomi is now in Mombasa on a mission to trace her mother whom her aunties said was a ‘night nurse.’ Her two visits to Beersheba bore no fruits.