HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE ADMITTED TO A FOSTER HOME?

The crying Godwin as we left him at the new home

How it feels? Ask Godwin. Godwin is the godly name I have nick-named him. He is four years old and got a life-time experience so early in life. Inquire and he will tell you. Maybe he will not have the right words and sentences. What about if you looked in his eyes or you observed his carriage. Will you be imaginative to see? There is nothing he knows better than pain if coming to terms with the past is pain. He has cried enough and his yester cry is nothing but a reminder that life will continue throwing lemons in his way. He is too young for all this.

Godwin is the fourth born in a family of four. Not six. It used to be that way. His parents are six feet down waiting for the resurrection, a word that may have missed his ears when the body of his mother was lowered in the dark earth two months ago. His father had died earlier, barely a year ago. He may not have mourned his father the way he cried to the fact that mother is no more because he was too young to know that death had visited his father. Somehow he will grow up to mourn them in his own way. He is still too young to think about HIV/AIDs. He does not know why people die. Nobody has ever whispered to him that children deserved happy families. He will know that later in life. As for now, he is a victim of another misdoing.

Godwin, 4, alongside his sister of eleven packed their belongings from Kibera slums in the morning ready to leave their friends and neighbours to a home they know no one. He was born in Kibera and no any other place he knew apart from the rural Karachuonyo that he went once escorting his mother’s body for burial. The packing, bathing and clothing activities may have brought anxiety in him because of his age but not to his sister who acts as a parent to the boy. The fact is that they would leave the goodness and the badness of Kibera slums; if not for a while, forever. And forever to her is following her mother to where she rests. In the new home there is no hunger and rain does not wet the rags on the floor where she had slept all this long. There she will find her mother and father in good health ready to take care of them. What about if she was wrong?

The guardian confirmed the document letters from the area chief referring the children to Flamingo* Children’s Home in Kayole. They were intact. He closed his door and looked in the next room where the children were accommodated. Earlier on the family was his neighbours. He had loved them. Good they came near his rural home. He had witnessed the disintegration of the family when sickness set in. The landlord will allow a new tenant in. He will forget that he had neighbours who had a young boy called Godwin. He will not forget. He may have thought about this as he lifted the suitcase by the help of a social worker to move on. Life is a matter of moving on- to face the good and the bad.

Kayole and Kibera are two different places though they host people of the same social status. It takes an adventurous person to roundup the estates in Nairobi. Some live in the city at a singular place till their time of death or rural shift knocks. Children are less mobile. Boarding a bus to town and another to Kayole was a journey  to a new land to the boy. He was holding his breath that it does not be like the one to Karachuonyo. He struggled to have the suitcase and pull it on the road. The roads could not allow. Children trusted the elders among and unquestioningly followed.

There were other 89 children in the home. The organization started in 2000. Of the many organizations that help was sought from this was more understanding and deserved minimal requirements to have a child in. Sometimes the home may be willing but an eye would make you change your mind. Big Fish organizations no longer need more children. They are doing fine with theirs. Through donations, they fed and schooled children who live there. The addition of the children was through a contact known person or else they would be denied as relatives did to them.

Relatives whom I first thought had done the greatest insult to the soil by denying their own cannot be blamed for not accepting responsibility. As you gave birth, breed. Children should be planned as per the welfare of the family. Accidents do occur but it is not a reason for assuming responsibility. Many children are in different homes in Kenya. Many have been orphaned at different stages of infancy. It is a shame anyway to a poor man in a slum to have children he cannot cater for when personal providence is too limited. A person would say that it is inhuman to think this way. I have the view that though misfortune begets man, in many instances man is the one who gets out in search of misfortune. When reality dawns, excuses rise.

The last greeting came and the girl knew it. She turned her face away as if to evade from the reality. The boy was still confused though he did not expect chocolates to arrive. When he saw Clive waving as he stepped away he knew what the moment meant. It was not the wave parents did to their children after kisses in kindergartens just to collect them at the end of the day. It was a different kind of. As his mother went are these figures standing before him going to disappear, not to be seen again like his mother. They had lied to him and they offered fake company. They had taken him there to face the new faces. His cry was to curse them and the world. He strongly broke into a cry and the sister followed. I could have taken it easy if it was a school boy. This was reality.

If it were an adoption procedure, the adopter would have visited the boy severally and familiarized himself- bringing toys and all that he loved. With time, they boy would have felt free and easy to leave his three siblings and live a new. This would seem hopeful than a children’s home. A home has all the competitions to offer. There is no time to offer a single stubborn boy attention as a parent could have done. He will have to fight for food, clothes and space. Depending on how he looks at life as he grows in the home may determine if he runs away to become a street urchin, persevere and live an ordinary life or excel to write a story. I wish him the latter.

I thought I could never cry. I had long lied to myself that I am less sensitive. In pretense of camera carrier, I lagged behind, just to wipe my face. I was the boy and he was me. Unlike me, in the evening downpour, the boy must have been still crying. He was crying for the past and the future. I hope that when he will be a grown up, he will look back and remember this day positively. The world will be a better place and children will no longer cry as Michael Jackson sang. He will read this blog and remember me. Maybe I will have joined his parents. In all, we will be joined in the pain and happiness that come after. Whether there is resurrection or not, there will be no good answer as to why he cried on this day and other times.

The story is as true as it is. The writer is a volunteer at Heart to Heart Orphans Centre. For inquiry about the children and the foster home they are in please link to them.