Saturday 16th May 2026
Dreading my night’s travel. But call the nice bloke who brought me back from SGR to take me there.
I leave the ghastly garrett earlier than usual and go to Baraka to have a hearty breakfast of cabbage and rice with white coffee. It is glorious to have space, light, breeze – and the cabbage and rice are nice as well.
Vicky arrives and is persuaded to a light brekkie before we head off to collect 20kg of Mama’s Power Uji flour and a box of (mainly) dewormers and anti-fungal creams.
The funding is another with groups from a selection of areas where girl children are given away in ‘marriage’ as payment to enemy tribes (or more often clans in the same tribe) to ensure that the rest of the family with not be thrown / burned / battered out of the property. Sometimes FGM and early marriage can be claimed to be “cultural”, but not here. This is very different. Girls are money / collateral in the tribal bank.
There is also a group described by Vicky as ‘very special’. These twelve girls are between the ages of 11 and 15. Their mothers, when they were that age, were abused and pimped out by their own fathers. And, as happens when you are raped (because, let’s face it, that is exactly what it was) on a long term basis, you get pregnant. And the girls with us today are some of the results. And their grandfathers, now the grandfathers are no longer interested in their own daughters, want to abuse their daughters’ daughters. And for the women who have suffered so much themselves, this cannot be allowed. So, with Mama B’s help they are leaving. There is much enthusiasm about the load of panties I have brought. This will be their initial business and highly profitable it will be too.
As well as this group there a couple for carrier bag sales, arrowroot and sweet potato, a landscaping contract and a farm growing maize. All far away from their abusers. The transport costs here are a bit high, because most of the groups have 15 people and fuel prices have skyrocketed here (no one knows how to turn a crisis into a moneymaking opportunity like the government here.).
We go out into the open, share the 20kgs of Uji flour and the dewormers. Somehow I have forgotten painkillers and the disppointment in the group is palpable.
We can’t get a tuktuk all the way back to Mtwapa as the guy that comes does not have the right sticker. I am now fretting about my night train ordeal and am not as bothered as I would usually be.
As it happens, other that my lovely bloke’s car being hit by a foul aggressive bloke driving an enormour truck and determined to overtake where there was no space (bit of a shock tbh), the entire trip back to Nairobi is not even half as bad as I feared even though the train is rammed,. I manage to sleep a bit and, having decided it would be unfair not to give David the option of the job rather than use one of the shouty blokes at the station, he picks me up. It is SO COLD.
There are, it appears, no street lights in Nairobi tonight and it makes for quite the scary ride on some of these big roads. I think I may have mentioned the Kenyan driver’s pathological inability to drive with lights at anything other than full beam.
But we reach Corner. Also in darkness
And I sleep.
Oh !!! Did I mention, in our five sweaty days in Mombasa, Mama B rescued 336 women and 1130 children. New, safe lives for all. Girls get to go to school; no one is sold off to anyone, no more beatings, no more sexual abuse. So thank you to everyone who has donated or bought (unless you asked for a discount).
I think I will have a restful Sunday
