Former house-help Diminah Machanja Khasialo found calling in caring for orphans

Diminah Machanja Khasialo (right)  found the first baby for her children’s centre in a garbage pit 16 years ago. Now, she looks after more than 100 children. [PHOTOS: NANJINIA WAMUSWA/ STANDARD]

BY NANJINIA WAMUSWA

At 10am, children line up for porridge in a hall. The cheeky ones push and shove, displacing others from the queue. The woman serving the porridge stops her work and threatens to turn back the naughty children. The shoving stops and she resumes her work.

Welcome to Tunza Children’s Centre, founded by Diminah Machanja Khasialo 16 years ago with only three babies. Today, it houses 118 children.

Diminah, popularly known as Mama Tunza, had worked as a house-help for 20 years, but started the children’s home after finding three abandoned babies in less than a month.

Garbage pit

The 54-year-old ‘mother of hundreds’ first found a little girl who was about seven months old. The baby had been left in a garbage pit near Mama Tunza’s house in Kibera.

“I heard the baby crying outside at around 11pm,” she recalls. “The sight of a baby left in the cold amid the garbage made me cry.”

A week later, her male neighbour brought her one-day-old baby, wrapped in a plastic bag. He said he had found the baby along the road.

In the same week, Diminah found an abandoned two-year-old child at a bus stop along Jogoo Road, in Nairobi.

“I reported all these cases to chiefs and police stations, but they told me to stay with the children until their parents or guardians turned up. No one came to claim the babies,” she says.

Diminah saw the rate at which she was getting babies as a sign that God was assigning her a different duty. She quit her house-help job in 1997 and started a baby day care centre in Kibera. Mothers from the neighbourhood would leave their baby’s under her care and pay Sh100 per baby every month.

Surprisingly, some of the women abandoned their children at her premises, and in five months, she had 20 children. She blames economic hardships and broken marriages for the increasing number of abandoned children.

Since then, Diminah has been receiving children from across Kenya, many abandoned in vehicles, playing fields and lodgings. Others are left near the centre at night.

Constraints

She recalls a recent incident when dogs barked continuously at night. She woke up to find a toddler at her gate, and took him in.

The youngest child at the centre is three months old and the oldest are in their early 20s.

“Some children come here aware of their names. Those who don’t are baptised and named,” Diminah says. “Many of them do not know how they landed at the centre.”

The children attend several institutions. One is studying Medicine at Kenyatta University and two are in private colleges in Nairobi. Others are in primary and secondary schools in the city, Ngong’, Kakamega, Vihiga, Kisumu and Nakuru.

However, due to financial constraints, some who have completed secondary school are unable to pursue their secondary education.

Born in Kakamega County in 1959, Diminah has no formal education, but she does not let that deter her from running the centre as best as she can. Her main challenge is that she needs to employ staff who are more educated than she is.

Illiteracy

In the past, some of her workers would capitalise on her illiteracy to seize opportunities meant to benefit the needy. She does not understand English, and therefore, relies on her staff for translation during meetings with donors.

She says, “They said things I did not understand, and helped themselves to donations meant for the children.”

But Diminah praises the staff she has today, saying they are dedicated to caring for the vulnerable children.

Some of her previous employees took more than just material things. In 2006, Diminah had more than 100 children at the home in Kibera. One day, she left to attend a funeral at her rural home in Kakamega, only to return a week later to find the centre deserted. Her employees had ganged up to move the children to a home they had registered under a different name. Diminah was particularly sad to lose the first three children; the pioneers of the children’s centre.

She started afresh and the number has increased, with time, to 118, and counting.

Although caring for more than 100 children can be difficult, Diminah says she is not ready to lose any of them. She is married with four children of her own who mix well with the others in the centre.