Sad story of 46-year-old woman whose eyes were gouged out at a tender age of 13

Muhoroni, Kenya: When we arrived to interview her, we found Rispah Achieng Andega planting potato vines on her small plot. From the way she held the hoe and sank each potato stem into the mounds of earth, you would be forgiven for thinking that she had eyes.

The only pointer that she was different is when she quickly took a stick and drove it into the ground to mark where the work had stopped, after which she led us, groping, into her hut.

Rispah is now 46 years old, but when a mysterious man grabbed her neck from behind and plucked out her eyes, she was only 13.

I remember my dad bolting out of the hut with a spear and a shield at dusk and the herds boy darting after him before they melted into the darkness. It was some minutes after 7pm, for the night birds were hooting in the surrounding bush.

When they returned later that night, nothing stuck in my memory more than the deep grief that spread on my mother’s face as she listened to the news from the returnees that someone had gouged out the eyes of a neighbour’s daughter.

The herds boy, Joshua Omondi Abade, now 58 and a preacher, remembers the events of that hour vividly although it happened 33 years ago on the eastern border of Muhoroni constituency, in a small village called Odiyo Wang’e in Tamu location. His employer was the late Barack Okech Ndago

Rispah says, “I was running to catch up with the other girls, my classmates, who had left me behind. “Suddenly I felt someone behind me. I turned quickly and saw him  bonce, just once. He was a very tall man. He grabbed the back of my neck, and then my throat. I screamed once. But I did not manage to cry again. He strangled me so badly that I do not remember what happened next. But I recall the excruciating pain I felt as my eyes were being removed.”

Rispah blames the loss of her eyes on her mother’s plate. That fateful Tuesday was a parents’ day at Songhor Primary School, and the school had asked pupils to carry plates to school for their parents’ use. The plates were so many that Rispah took time to identify hers, which she wanted to return home that evening hence why she was left behind and was running to catch up with her friends.

Many years later, Rispah carried the plate to her matrimonial home as the only reminder of what befell her that night 33 years ago.

Back to that night of horror. A sharp cry had pierced the still air that evening, but only Barrack had detected the distress call from a helpless girl.

“I would have died but for the late Barrack,” says Rispah, now 46.

Abade remembers how, as they ran towards the screaming, the first people they met were Mzee Barrack’s daughters returning from school, and their father asked who they had left behind. The daughters said it was Rispah. Abade and his master ran even faster to the point of the distress call. And then they tip-toed, in time to hear dry sugarcane leaves rustling some distance inside a plantation.

“Barrack asked in a loud voice: ‘Who is that?’,” Abade recalls. “And we heard someone run deep into the cane plantation. Barrack flashed the spotlight and asked again: ‘Who is there in the sugarcane at this hour?’”

Abade says it was then that the young, helpless voice of a girl reached them: “It is I Rispah...daughter of Andega. Someone strangled me and removed both my eyes. I cannot see.”

The rescuers entered the cane field and found the child drenched in blood pouring from the sockets of her eyes. Her right ear was in shreds — the man had bitten it. They carried her to her father’s homestead.That was how young Rispah ended up at Kisumu’s Russia Hospital where she stayed for four years. Even though they managed to sew up her ear, the eyeballs were gone forever.

Rispah’s mother, Mama Rosa Andega, says they later heard that the cruel perpetrator was an outlaw who had run away from Kibigori near Miwani Sugar Company. He had committed a similar act there. But he was never caught, hence Rispah was never served justice.

Rispah, her husband and children today live on half an acre of land bought for her in 2012 by her local church, the Christian Believers Fellowship. Her three children Joseph Mwita, Maurice Kamonge and Angeline Boke have not gone to school properly. Only Joseph, who is in Form Two, is determined to complete school.

Rispah’s dream was to become a nurse. But this was snuffed out at 13 by a stranger. Now she tries to lead as normal a life as possible.

As we leave her, she stands in her yard and asks jocularly, “But how did you find where I live?” Before we answer, she says aloud: “Ah, I know it is easy to look for a blind woman’s place. You simply ask: ‘Show me where the blind one lives’.”

And then she laughs, gropes back to the stick which she had sunk into the mound of earth where she was planting potatoes when we arrived. She continues with the chore as if we had not interrupted at all.