How desperate Kenyan mom of five found her Blessing
NAIROBI, Kenya: It was a cold night with blustering winds, and the two women were taking a risky short cut along a railway line, past a festering garbage dump, far from the relative safety of the slum’s busy main road. They kept their heads down as their hearts raced. A stray dog insistently barked.
All reason would have advised against stopping, but something about the way the dog barked made Hyrine Mita think twice and walk toward it. She is a woman of passionate Christian faith, and she would later say that God had intervened.
The dog, it turned out, was barking at a newborn girl, abandoned amid discarded milk packets, tattered hair extensions and decaying food waste. Her shivering body was wrapped in a dirty, wet towel. Her stomach was still covered in blood; her umbilical cord had been haphazardly cut.
Hyrine’s friend urged her to leave the baby there, worried that she would die in Hyrine’s hands and they would be accused of killing her. “You have five children already,” the friend reminded her, “and you can barely feed them”.
We met Hyrine as part of our reporting for a project earlier this year in which Washington Post correspondents followed six families around the world as they navigated the pandemic’s battering waves of economic collapse. We chronicled how Hyrine, 33, struggled to keep a job, put food on the table and keep her tight-knit family from unraveling.
But we were not surprised when she called to invite us to meet her family’s newest addition: Blessing.
“I could have chosen to walk away,” she said two weeks later in her characteristically upbeat tone, cradling Blessing in her arms. “I could have chosen to be afraid. I am a widower, trying to survive. There were questions that ran through my head, but look at all my kids. It is possible. We keep going.”
Times are still tough for Hyrine and her kids. Donations that followed our reporting allowed her to pay off most of her debts and get back on the antiretroviral treatment.
Nearly 90% of Kenyans live on less than $5 a day, and Kenyan mothers on average have four children. For some young women, as wrenching as leaving a baby to die might have been, the cost of raising a newborn would just be too high, especially now, with hunger already stalking their own homes.
In Kenya, community health organisations in slums say that teenage pregnancies are soaring during the pandemic as schools have been shut down. Abortions are illegal in Kenya, except when a mother’s life is in danger.
“Abandonment happens when there is conflict within families, and that is certainly increasing,” said Evelyn Bowa, who runs a foundation in Nairobi’s Kibera slum that works with girls and young women ages 10 to 25. “Young mothers face enormous stigma. An unplanned baby can mean an early marriage, or dropping out of school, or being kicked out of home.”
After Hyrine took Blessing into her arms for the first time, she brought her to a clinic, and then to neighbourhood authorities, who opened a file with the police. An investigation is ongoing, but Hyrine has been given legal custody of the baby for now.
According to the top neighborhood authority, Joseph Songa, Hyrine will only be allowed to keep the baby if the real mother is not found. |