Nation
Wednesday, June 27, 2001

Lost ... and found
By JOE OMBUOR Dolphin Sumba was seven years old that afternoon when she met a "Good Samaritan" on her way home from Grogan A Primary School in Kariobangi.

Enticed with bananas, she deviated from her route to her Korogocho home and went with the woman to Gitari Marigu, the name of a city slum which, in Kikuyu means, "has no bananas". The slum is a labyrinth of mud shacks, literally hanging over the sludge-like Nairobi River from the edge of the populous Dandora Estate.

The open sewers and man-holes foul the air without apology.

The confusion here, say residents, "is enough to swallow an adult". A child simply gets lost in it as did Dolphin when she was herded there in early January, 1998, never to be seen by her parents for the next three years.

"She told me to go back home if that was what I wished, but I could not find my way home or to school. I was too confused to ask anybody."

Did she know this woman? "Yes. Only as Nyar-Asembo (woman from Asembo), for all the time I lived with her, nursing her children and doing all the household chores you can think of," reminisces Dolphin tearfully.

With a childlike sniffle, she adds: "Food was meagre. At times, I slept hungry and I was repeatedly beaten. I was never paid anything for the time I lived with her – over a year – until her business collapsed and she had to leave for her rural home."

Dolphin, who was in Standard Four at the time of her abduction, was abandoned by Nyar Asembo and her husband at the bus stop opposite Rewawa Cham gi Wadu Bar and Restaurant in Dandora Phase 4.

Unsure of where else to go, the little girl, then just eight, "retraced her steps" to the plot where she had lived and into the empty house and cried bitterly for a long time. "I was fished out by the landlady," she says.

Still, this was no rescue. Her luck had nit turned. Dolphin's new custodian, whose name she gives as Mama Anyango, subjected her to treatment as harsh as she had been living under. She became the new maid, tending to her host's four children.

One of the landlady's children, an eight-year-old, went to Kinyago Primary School and was older than Dolphin, she recalls.

Dolphin talks of nightmares during her stay with Mama Anyango, a business woman who frequently went on safari, leaving her open to the predatory leering and attacks from her husband, brothers and neighbours.

"I could sit up the whole night when Anyango's husband, and at times her brothers, wanted to sleep with me," she sobs.

Several times, Dolphin was beaten to break her spirit. In those times, her only respite was a dash to the house of her host's relative in a storey building several metres away.

"They would come for me there and drag me back, even as I cried out for help – until one day, a neighbour got concerned and asked me what relations I had with those people," she narrates.

Ms Lorna Adavaji, a Nairobi City Council employee and a widowed mother of two, says: "Dolphin could remember her father's name. She could remember that he worked with Super Loaf Bakery. So all we did was buy a loaf of bread and read the telephone number on the wrapper. That is how we came to speak with the father."

Moses Eshiwani, picks up the tale: "I was like a person in a dream as I Iistened to that strange voice on the telephone. I had long given up my daughter for dead!"

He could hardly organise his thoughts throughout the conversation.

"You see, we had buried her back home in Kisa, Kakamega District, in accordance with custom. We interred the stem of a banana plant, signalling that she was dead and forgotten."

When he spoke to his wife, later that evening, she dismissed him as insane. "She said I was hallucinating over our dead daughter," he says.

But Moses mustered the courage to go to Dandora unaccompanied. He did not want to raise any suspicions.

The reunion between father and daughter was like a scene out of the utopian Shangrila.

"All I recall is that I dreamily saw and received Dolphin into my hands. We were somewhere in Dandora Phase 4, but mentally, I was in dreamland even as we travelled to Kiambiu slum behind the Kenya Airforce base – where I live," he explains.

And then the girl's mother saw her ...

Moses says of that reunion: "They both cried – it was tears and at times laughter, as though they were deranged until I separated them. A crowd quickly gathered and those who had known of our plight wept – I do not know if it was joy relief or sadness. They just wept."

The family hurriedly arranged trip to their Kisa home "to undo the death rituals and reclaim Dolphin as a living member of the family".

It was shocking and dramatic, says Moses, because "people took to their heels when they saw Dolphin. They were convinced that they were seeing her ghost. Others simply fainted."

To symbolically bring her to life, as tradition demands, "blood had to soak the soil of her ancestors," says Moses. A sheep was slaughtered atop her "grave". A banana crop was planted "to symbolise that the dead had risen and would thrive on the humus below."

She has grown, but not as a normal 11-year-old child.

"Dolphin is capricious, somehow timid and patently rude. Her sociability is poor," laments her father who does not know what to do with a pre-adolescent daughter who has had to endure the shocks of separation from family and forced labour.

Dolphin keeps toying around with her thumb, at times breaking into spontaneous laughter as we talk.

"I cannot take her back to Standard Four. She just will not fit, and a special school is too expensive for me."

Moses is a casual employee, earning Sh120 a day while his wife, Penina Robai takes care of their three children.

Walking with Dolphin in Gitari Marigu is like taking her back home. Her former playmates shout her name as those who had known her accost her in Dholuo, a language she speaks with the fluency of a mother tongue.

As we approached the shack where Dolphin had lived, she shouted to a boy, "Odhiambo mak guog no kik kawa (Odhiambo hold that dog so it won't bite us)."

But the woman who had lived with Dolphin was not to be found. She was away on safari. A neighbour, Mr Jared Ang'ada, said: "We are surprised that she never paid her a penny, but Dolphin was a good girl. We could not understand why she habitually beat her."

Dolphin says she was confined to Dandora save for Christmas Day, last year, when her host took her along with her family for an excursion to Nairobi's Uhuru Park.

"We were in a boat when I noticed someone I knew from afar and alerted my guardian. She hurriedly ended our fun and hassled us into a Dandora-bound bus," she says.

Dolphin next saw her father on March 14, 2001.

"I felt apprehensive when she did not return for lunch that day. Evening came, and when she failed to show up, I went to Ruaraka Police Station to report her as a missing person," says Moses.

His wife was away in Kisa at the time and he routinely came home at midday to cook lunch for the children.

Sorrow pitched tent at the Eshiwani home as the search for their first child turned into agony, with days turning into months. "My wife came around as soon as the sad news reached her. We hardly ate and wasted away physically," says Moses.

Dolphin's younger brother, Victor Owire, then four years old, kept demanding to know where she went.

"We gave ourselves to God and our association with the church helped us cope with the situation a lot," says Penina.

Their joy at reuniting as family is, however, tainted by worry. What kind of adult will Dolphin grow into? What of the abductor and the woman who took in their daughter afterwards?

"We have given them to God and forgiven them for their act. The landlady who stayed with Dolphin sounded remorseful when I met her after discovering the girl," says Moses. He is the head of his household. Forgiving will, perhaps, give him the fortitude to be the parent he must be.

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