A woman in Kibera is searching for her 22-year-old daughter who ran away with her husband in a bizarre case of husband snatching. Caroline Achieng, 36, has been in agony for the past one year during which her efforts to trace her missing daughter whom she conceived as a teenager have been fruitless.
The daughter went missing after a family altercation that ensued from a revelation that she had an affair with her stepfather, got pregnant and procured an abortion, all paid for by her mother after a well-choreographed trickery by the duo.
Achieng’s daughter was last seen at the Kibera District Commissioner’s office when the family had been summoned over rape allegations that she had filed against her stepfather.
“We have had our low moments as a family and at some point it got so bad that I fought with my husband and he moved out of our house carrying his and my daughter’s clothes,” Ms Achieng told Nairobi News.
The family drama started in September 2013 when Ms Achieng’s daughter was unwell and frequently complained of stomach pain.
“I told her to go for a checkup and when she came back from the clinic she told me she had been given ulcers medication,” said Ms Achieng.
The girl’s illness kept recurring and at one time the stepfather proposed that he takes her to a better hospital for checkup and to which Achieng obliged.
“He told me that he had identified a doctor at Kijabe Hospital where the girl would be treated and since I was the sole family breadwinner, running a charcoal business, I financed them and they went to the hospital,” she said.
Achieng also financed the follow-up trips to Kijabe Hospital for the treatment of her daughter as her illness kept getting worse until she closed down her charcoal vending business because of the huge hospital bills.
“It was months later after she (daughter) had filed the rape case that she narrated to the officers at Kilimani police station what had happened. That’s when I learnt that all this time when she was ‘ailing’ she was trying to procure an abortion,” said the mother.
Achieng felt cheated as the girl revealed that her step-father had impregnated her and sourced for a clinic where she was given abortion pills that made her stomach pains worse at first but later flushed out the eight-weeks-old foetus.
“She told the officers that she was sexually assaulted repeatedly by my husband since when she was 8-years-old and was impregnated later but she never wanted me to know since her father threatened her,” narrated the mother.
The mother of seven resolved to divorce her husband but before he moved out of the house, her daughter went missing.
Ms Achieng says she searched for her at her relatives’ houses in vain and it is only after her husband of 15 years moved out that she heard that the two had reconnected and were living in an estate unknown to her.
She has been living in agony over her failed marriage as well as being unable to trace her first born daughter who lives with a man who broke her heart and left her with six other children to fend for.
Achieng has managed to secure a casual job with the National Youth Service but she owes her landlord six months’ rent arrears due to her meager earnings that she splits to cater for children school fees and food."
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