At around 3pm every week day, five-year-old Stephen Kimani leaves his nursery class at Rutune Primary School.
With his books stashed in a backpack and a toy car made from an old water bottle firmly in his hand, he dashes down the road, heading home.
But Kimani's excitement fades and turns into fear when he and his school friends reach Thiha, a river that snakes between rocks and heavy vegetation in the valley separating his school from his home in Karuero village.
Difficult part
That is when the most difficult part of his journey home begins - crossing the river.
There is no proper bridge. He and his friends must use a makeshift structure that wobbles dangerously under the slightest weight.
The bridge is little more than a rickety contraption made from old timber held together by wooden planks.
Every once in a while, a concerned villager will hammer in place a plank to replace one that has rotted away and fallen into the river below.
But the patching does little to help the situation.
Being the bravest one among his friends, Kimani proceeds cautiously, pausing midway as the rickety bridge shakes. One wrong move could send him plummeting 12 feet to the jagged rocks below.
Crawl across
He makes it across, but some of his friends wait for an adult to help them, others crawl across.
This is the nightmare that residents of Karuero village in Mukurweini constituency have to live with every day.
Anxious parents hold their breath and whisper a prayer for their children as they go to school in the morning and in the evening when they come back.
The daily journey is even more dangerous for the children as the bridge has no hand rails.
“People fall off all the time. One person fell and died a year ago," says Wachira Nyaga.
He cannot remember the number of times he helped stranded school children and terrified women and elderly people across the bridge.
Slippery wood
"The children really suffer. They have to cross the bridge very early in the morning when the old wood is wet with dew and it is easy to slip and fall," said Wachira.
The villagers say the makeshift bridge cost Sh100,000 from the Constituency Development Fund when it was constructed in 2006.
"It cost Sh100,000 to construct. It was good for a while until the rains destroyed one end," said Dickson Michoro.
According to, Michoro, pleas to leaders and government officials to build a better bridge have fallen on deaf ears.
He says the bridge only comes up during election campaigns, with politicians making empty pledges which are forgotten as soon as they either win or lose.
“This bridge connects two locations. Sometimes we do our farming on one side and have to cross over to the market on the other side,” he said.
