Lily Sigilai arrives home with a pile of firewood on her back.
She drops it on the ground with a thud and sighs heavily from the exhaustion of hauling it this far.
A smile plays on her mouth, which has started showing early wrinkles, as her delighted children rush to embrace her.
The youngest one, who is months old, is visibly hungry and proceeds to breastfeed. The rest congregate around her in anticipation of a meal which, sadly, she has to head off to find as soon as the baby is fed.
Sigilai lives in Olmekenyu in Narok South. She is only 34, but her haggard look shows a woman whose youth is long past her.
Poor, homeless, illiterate and shouldering the burden of feeding eight children, two of whom have special needs, life couldn’t have dealt her a worse card.
That she is married doesn’t make much difference.
MALE CHILD
She says it was not her wish to have eight children, especially considering that she and her husband can barely feed and clothe them, but because of cultural dictates she ended up with eight girls “trying to get at least one boy”.
Sigilai lives in a community where the majority believe that boys are more valuable in the society and men value wives more when they bear male children.
“After bearing the eighth child, I thought that I should just accept that it is God’s plan that I don’t have a boy,” says Sigilai, with a tinge of sadness.
She lives in a small shack into which all 10 of them squeeze in a camp for families that were evicted by the government from the fringes of the Mau forest last year.
Sigilai and a host of other internal refugees have lost all hope in the future. “We live each day at a time: go out to work in the farms and eat what we get. God will take care of tomorrow,” she says.
Her eldest daughter, who completed high school last year, eloped with her lover six months ago to start her own family. She was 19.
Her younger sibling is also married. The other girls are in primary school.
POVERTY
But what causes Sigilai sleepless nights are two partially blind daughters, who have never stepped in a school because they need special aids to read.
“I once took them once to a hospital in Nakuru and the doctors said when they grow older, their sight will improve. I have not seen much improvement,” she says, adding that they have been looking for help in vain.
The nearest school for the blind is in Kisumu, which is way off her radar — and budget. For now, they just sing and pray.
Yet the duo will miss the opportunity to get an education, learn basic life skills and ultimately employment that would guarantee them better lives than their mother’s.
The Sigilai family is painfully staring at generational poverty. That reality has made Sigilai start using birth control methods, and abandoned the “search” for a baby boy.
Most of the displaced families in the Mau are in a similar predicament: large families with little hope of income.
The Saturday Nation found out that a majority of women aged between 30 and 40 have nine to 12 children, a whopping 60 per cent above the national average household size of 3.9 children, according to the 2019 census – which was a drop from 4.2 in 2009.
EARLY MARRIAGES
The lack of access to family planning services, lack of consent from their husbands to use modern birth control methods and low literacy levels fuel poverty, and girls are exposed to early marriages to escape the cycle.
Ironically, they end up with similarly large families, as they start giving birth early.
According to the “U-Report” of 2016, thousands of girls and women in Kenyan rural areas lack access to family planning information and services.
Research has shown that family planning is central to women’s empowerment and gender equality, saves lives and is a key factor in reducing poverty.
That a family can have 12 children in this era, therefore, is a damning account for a country that was the first in sub-Saharan Africa to adopt birth-control measures.
This speaks to a lack of proper systems to ensure that development trickles down to the remote areas.
The last leg of our journey to Olmekenyu was bumpy and treacherous — with muddy roads in a mountainous region.
Donkeys ferry farm produce while boda boda offer easier and faster transport. For the displaced people, basic human needs are a struggle to find.
“I am suffering,” says Nancy Busienei, a mother of 12. She does backbreaking jobs to put food on the table for her children.
SUICIDAL
Of the 12, none has set foot in secondary school. Some stopped going to school altogether.
“I was stripped of my three-acre farm near Mau by the government. Beans, which we relied on for income, were destroyed. The government should save us or we will perish,” she says.
At another camp in the neighbouring Sagamian Ward, we meet a middle-aged woman who seems disturbed.
She says she was conned out of land she bought in the Mau settlement at Sh250,000 by a man she calls Bernard.
She breaks down when asked where her family is. It turns out that she lost five of her 11 children.
Now, she just wants her land – or cash – back. “In this hopelessness, I constantly have suicidal thoughts,” she says.
Then we accompany Veronica Rotich and her 16-year-old daughter, who has Down’s Syndrome, to Mekenyu Dispensary for a medical check-up.
Sadly, her younger brother suffers the same disease. Rotich bore 10 children; one is now deceased and the two need extra care, a balancing act she struggles to maintain as she works to feed them.
SPECIAL NEEDS
Three of her eldest daughters have got married, like most of their teenage peers in the area.
Rotich asks whether we could help her children with special needs. “The girl dropped out of lower primary school because she could not keep up with the other learners. The boy at least got to Standard Four,” she says.
Clearly, the family has lost hope in those children amounting to much because they never got specialised treatment.
But their mother feels that financial and medical support would ease her burden.
With hindsight, she wishes she had had information about and access to contraceptives, which she says were rare in Nkoben, where they lived prior to their eviction.
Most young mothers who spoke to the Saturday Nation agree that birth control is necessary, but the contradiction between belief and practice, they say, is because their husbands deny them permission to access family planning clinics.
Diana Chepng’eno, a mother of one, says she has been taught various methods of family planning and embraced those that suit her needs.
MYTHS
The young mother thinks those who have many children have many ova or are more fertile. But this is not true as a woman releases a single ovum in a month.
Brenda Langat, another young mother, says the reasons for shunning contraceptives are varied for different couples.
“While some don’t have money to purchase the drugs or devices, there are those whose husbands expressly order them not to dare use contraceptives,” she says.
The daring ones sneak into clinics and have some procedures done. We ask the men about the issue and they say women are responsible for the high fertility rate.
“In this day and age, a woman who conceives when the other child can barely walk needs to soul-search,” one of them says.
“It’s not only the women who are concerned, because it is uncultured not to plan children.”
Another one says it’s upon a man and his wife to decide how many children they want to have and at what stage.
Alfred Lang’at, chairman of Olmekenyu Resettlement Camp, blames the high fertility rate on a number of factors, chief of them the remoteness of the area and naivety of its people.
“There is a need for a targeted approach on the use of modern methods of contraception by rural women. Some may even have access to the pills but don’t know how to use them effectively,” he says.
CHILD REARING
Everline Chepkwony, an elderly woman, says: “In our time, we used to have plenty of food and milk for the children. But the couples of today, who do menial jobs to provide for their families, have children who often sleep hungry,” she says, shaking her head.
Godfrey Sang, a history researcher and publisher, says childbearing in the past was programmed in a way that a husband would leave the homestead for over a year to allow the wife to raise their newborn.
That was possible because men had alternative homes due to polygamy. “Culturally, issues of children were left to the women. Men were not supposed to carry an infant or be involved in the early lives of their children. They left the homestead because they believed a woman had impurities at that stage,” says Sang.
Deciding how many children to have was never an issue. Children were then seen as a blessing and source of labour in the farms.
Sang observes that sex is the only form of entertainment available to rural folks, hence the surging populations. “Employment opportunities must be devolved,” he says.
Nationally, young girls and women below the age of 24 years account for 70 per cent of all pregnancies, most of which are usually unwanted.
BOOST ACCESSIBILITY
According to the Kenya Health Demographic Survey, 50 per cent of married and sexually active unmarried women in the rural areas have an unmet need for family planning.
“Limited access to reproductive health services, gender inequality, stockouts, distance to health points, cultural norms, and lack of skilled service providers are some of the barriers to accessing family planning services in rural areas and have led to them having poor health outcomes,” states the document.
If the figures are what Kenyan government banks on to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and Vision 2030, then the targets may be far from being met, considering that 76 per cent of poor people live in these neglected rural areas.
Chimaraoke Izugbara, head of the Population Dynamics and Reproductive Health at the African Population and Health Research Centre, in 2016 said that Kenya needed a new plan to make contraceptives accessible again.
The United Nations Population Fund noted that family planning information and services also empower women to plan if and when to have children.
“Through this, they are better enabled to complete their education, their autonomy within their households is increased and their earning power is improved. This strengthens their economic security and well-being and that of their families.”