Broken marriage, life in the gutter, gang rapes, twin girls, this woman has seen it all

By NJOKI CHEGE nchege@ke.nationmedia.com

Posted  Monday, April 22   2013 

IN SUMMARY

• Changing fortunes: She was once a happily married woman who woke up everyday to take care of her three children. Then one day she found herself throen out of her home and on the streets, and from there life took a tumble. The traumatic experiences of a broken marriage and life in the streets took her over the edge and doctors are worried that it may take more than just therapy to bring her back on trackFew words can begin to explain what this woman is going through. Mentally sick and living the life of an outcast, she now has two children to take care of, the product of a rape that has scarred her for life.

We will call her Wanjiku — for both legal and moral obligations — but that name can belong to any other woman out there. It will, thus, not send a chill down your spine, but her story will.

Her life, as she puts it in between sobs, is not worth living, not even with the twin bundles of joy we find her holding at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital, where she has been recovering for the past few days.

As soon as she sees us approaching her bed, she rises up gracefully, makes to welcome us by her side, but retreats almost immediately, withdrawing into a dark world filled with memories of abuse and neglect, a world few can even begin to comprehend.

Wanjiku seems a bit agitated, which is a paradox because her stature abed is that of pure calmness. She does not seem to particularly like my cameraman, probably because of his huge camera, so he slings it on his back and takes a step back.

Immediately, Wanjiku is at ease again. With muted love, the kind that only a mother can have for her child, her eyes shift to the set of two-week old twins, now in the hands of friends who have been visiting with her. There is little emotion in her eyes... her face... but you can almost feel it, almost touch it.

The silence is making me uncomfortable, so I open my mouth to speak, seeking, like a journalist should, to break the ice.

As if on cue, Wanjiku lights up and begins to say something in Kikuyu, addressing the male doctor in the room as ithe wa Mbacia.

The doctor nods in agreement, trying, with amazing futility, to hide the fact that he cannot fathom what she is saying.

Then Wanjiku, still sitting on the bed that has been her home for the past three weeks, embarks on a long soliloquy about a land dispute no one in the room understands. We stand there, helpless and somehow ashamed of it, as the woman goes on and on about some contested land.

Then she stops... and starts again, more keenly this time. She switches topics and starts talking about the Pope.  Stroking her jet black hair, she goes on, still speaking in Kikuyu but throwing in some English phrases such as “sincerely speaking” and “in the Name of the Most High”. Her English is impeccable.

It is hard to keep up with Wanjiku. Before I know it, she is going to Dubai for shopping, has visited Rome, and tells us how easy she can make it for any one of us, dear visitors, to see the Pope. A long, long time ago, she tells us, she was once the “president of the republic”.

“She has clearly relapsed,” explains Dr Fredrick Obago, who has been attending to her for a few weeks now. “Now she is in an anxious mood and probably has hallucinations, which is why you will find her imagining that she is the president or the Pope.”

Wanjiku has relapsed into a schizophrenic world that only she knows. The events of the past few months seem to have taken a toll on her and now she is an island surrounded by a sea of humanity that cannot understand her, a lone, troubled, vulnerable new mother.

Her thought processes have broken down and she shows no emotions, even when the tiny and hungry twin angels she gave birth to a few days ago wail.

Yes, Wanjiku is in trouble. Big trouble. And she knows it.

Her story, however, does not start inside these brightly lit walls of the Nairobi Women’s Hospital. No. The sad chapter of her life story starts in the bustling streets of Kangemi.

Estimated to be aged 34, Wanjiku was once married with three children. She was, you could say, the average woman next door who wakes up every morning to make breakfast for her family and prepare the children for school.Then the pressures of life got the best of her and she found herself in the alleys of Kangemi, begging for a livelihood. She would scavenge for food in the dumpsites of the massive Kangemi market and sleep in the dark corridors of this neighbourhood described last week by Police Inspector General David Kimaiyo as “one of the most dangerous in the city”.

Lucy Githui, who runs a small business in the area, says she first met Wanjiku at the market a few months ago.

“The first thing I noticed about her was that she was very clean,” says Lucy. “I also noticed that she was pregnant and later learnt that she spent a lot of time sleeping outside a restaurant next to the market. The restaurant owner was generous and would give her any food she desired.”

Soon, Lucy continues, the women of the market started to take a keen interest in “this pregnant woman who seemed mentally ill and slept in the streets”.

“Given her condition (pregnancy), we got concerned. We assumed she was lost, so we decided to place a lost-and-found announcement in one of the city vernacular radio stations. We made four announcements but nobody came forward to claim her,” says Lucy.

Then the rains began and Wanjiku soaked all the cold in. Pricked by their collective conscience, the market women decided to pool resources and take Wanjiku out of the cold, dank Kangemi dumpsites.

But one thing was still missing in the whole picture. Who was this beautiful, clean woman whose demeanour said something else about her? Was she really mad or had destitution driven her to this wretched life?

As they tried to piece the puzzle together, they noticed something peculiar: Wanjiku never wore any undergarments. They asked her why... and the pieces of the puzzle began to fall in place.

“Why should I bother to wear underwear, yet at night they will still come and tear them off?” she asked in protest.

It was then that it dawned on the women that, night after night, as she slept, Wanjiku would be raped by street gangs. She had endured the repeated assaults late in her pregnancy and seemed to have given up the fight. That is how she had got pregnant in the first place that is the life she had become used to.

Doctors say that Wanjiku’s broken arm and leg could be as a result of the repeated rapes she endured throughout her pregnancy. Maybe she would try to ward off the attackers and maybe they would respond with kicks and blows, pinning her to the ground and assaulting her. Maybe in the end she decided the fight was not worth it, that it probably would be safer that way for both her and the babies she carried.

Wanjiku was taken to Nairobi Women’s Hospital, where she delivered a set of healthy twins — two girls who weighed 3.55 and 2.99 kilogrammes.

“Nutritionally, she was very healthy,” says Dr Obago, who helped deliver the twins. “It looks like she was being taken care of very well wherever she was. The babies were delivered through C-Section... and they are such adorable little girls!”

However, Dr Obago points out that Wanjiku would probably have died had she gone into labour while on the streets.

“The babies were breeched and I doubt whether she would have made it,” he says.

Details of Wanjiku’s past remain sketchy, but Lucy has taken it upon herself to find out where she came from. Her first stop was Limuru, where Wanjiku was once married and lived with her three children.

“I met the children, aged 12, nine, and seven. They told me that she started behaving strangely before her husband and mother-in-law sent her back to her home in Nyahururu,” she says.

Because of her condition, Wanjiku fell out with her siblings and soon found herself hopeless and helpless. The past four years have been tumultuous for Wanjiku, who has lived in an IDP camp in Limuru and the streets of Kinoo and, lately, Kangemi.Dr Obago attributes her condition to immense pressure due to the family break-up.

“Chances are by the time she was being kicked out, she was already unwell but nobody had any idea what was ailing her,” says Dr Obago.

However, all that is now behind Wanjiku, whose future seems uncertain, given her complicated situation. Soon after her delivery, she was sent to a shelter, but she became violent and aggressive and was sent back to hospital.

Dr Violet Oketch, a consultant psychiatrist who is part of the team attending to Wanjiku, says that what she needs most is constant care and support for both her and her twins.

She says that the hallucinations are part of the illness and it might take a while to get her back on track.

“Sometimes she is not in touch with reality and therefore needs a lot of support,” says Dr Oketch. “However, our priority at the moment is to stabilise her mental state and allow her to bond with the babies. She is in love with her babies. She is very possessive of them. She is always keen on breastfeeding them and always asks for extra blankets to keep them warm.”

And that is the story of Wanjiku, who is currently at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital. Doctors say she is making progress; that, somehow, she will let her past be just that, her past. But despite their optimistic outlook, they are keeping their fingers crossed.

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