The House of Heavy Stories - Owefu Part 1

'Some stories are heavy, mama.'

Some stories sit on your chest like a stone on the ground. "Who do you even tell? How do you even start?" she asked.

In the heart of Transnzoia poverty plants itself like a stubborn tree. There, I met a grandmother battling sickness, a mother with wounds you cannot see, and 3 daughters caught in a cycle of generational poverty that spun long before they were born.

As she began to speak, tears raced down her cheeks. I had just interviewed her daughters and did not expect what came next.

“I was raised in a house of violence. My father, a building contractor in Milimani, built homes for others but broke the one he lived in. He found comfort in bottles, and when he came home, he came with fists and fear. My mother did everything, including building the house we live in. I remember once my mother returned home half-naked and with bruises from searching for him. Then one day, he vanished, and we’ve been breathing under a dark cloud since.”

The challenge of affording school fees slowly crumbled our dreams.  I became pregnant at 16 years, got married, and moved to Nairobi. I started working in a salon. Bore children one, then two, then more. My daughters Anita 20, Ayuna, 17, and Annie, 13, and my 3 sons. With 6 children, we had to work harder. I worked in salons, flower farms, and maize farms, but still, poverty followed like a shadow. Life was very challenging, and so was marriage. We fought a lot, but I never wanted to break my marriage.

Then came the fracture: Ayuna, my daughter, was barely 15 when she became pregnant and had to drop out of school. Angered, my brother decided to follow up on this matter, and the truth fell like lightning: Her father was the perpetrator. As this case escalated, he vanished. The child, rejected by our traditional beliefs, was left at the hospital, and we have never looked back.

Since that day, I stopped calling Ayuna my daughter; she became a wound, yet I know that she is wounded too. It was hard to face the community without feeling judged and humiliated. Her siblings blame her for breaking up our family. If this girl could talk, she would shed a lot of pain. How can someone who is destined to guide and protect his child do this to his own child?

I sometimes run to crowds so that I am not alone with my thoughts. Many things stopped working because many things require us to return to the wound! I must find healing somehow.

Now Anita, who is two years older than I, with two kids, after making the same bad choices I did, I have lost hope with my girls. I look up to my son to finish school and come help me.

In the silence of the family's home, the walls keep stories you can dare not repeat. Daughters tying to heal from their mother's traumas. Mothers trying to protect daughters form their own fate, A lineage stitched with sorrow and survival. This is a real-life story of  40-year-old Owefu, because this is a taboo that families do not voice these stories, they live with wounds and pass on wounds. This is not a unique story here.  

© Namatsi Lukoye