How traditional means gave Kisumu woman a child after expulsion from four year childless marriage.

Ms. Benter Anyango 31, was forced out of her marriage after going through frustration from her husband’s parents for being unable to give birth to a child during her four years of matrimony.

Now a resident of Nyalenda Kisumu County, Benter sought a traditional birth attendant.She is a mother, thanks to Mrs. Margaret Osago 79, a traditional birth attendant in Nyalenda.According to them keeping a daughter-in-law who could not give them grandchildren will be a burden to them.

 

“My husband’s family rejected me and chased me away from my home because I could not give birth in the four years I have been in marriage. They demanded a child after missing to see me getting pregnant despite payment of all dowry to my home,” said Ms.Benter.

She says her numerous trips to hospitals with her husband and spending money they had hardly earned to have her situation rectified could not bear any fruits as doctors could say she had a growth which affected her ability to conceive.

The growth is said to be a condition which women in the Luo community refer to as ‘Rariu’ and believe it can only be healed by traditional experts.

Benter further reckons that the drugs she had been asked to buy when seeking medication at the Homabay Hospital were expensive and could not heal the ‘Rariu’, a pelvic inflammatory disease affecting the upper part of a woman's reproductive system.

“I could bleed heavily during menses and this shocked my husband but even after taking all the medicine from the hospital, there was no change as I could not get pregnant .” She said.

She recounts how she returned home in an evening and found all her belongings packed and piled outside her house with a bodaboda rider waiting by the side to facilitate her transportation.

It is her mother-in-law who broke the news that they had decided to send her away forever as she was not of any value to the family.
She opted to move to Kisumu and joined the National Youth Servicemen cleaning Nyalenda, a low socio-economic set up in the county.

It is during this new life that she shared her experience with a colleague she trusted. Benter is seated at the doorsteps of Mrs. Osago’s house with her three months old son in her arms; she remembers her first date with the 79-year-old who is seated next to her on the right-hand side.

She recalls how she could take two 2-litre jugs of a homemade creation of herbal medicine in quick succession just to have ‘Rariu’ pave way for her to be a mother.She confirms that her husband is already married to another woman and has managed to give the family a grandson.

“I could diarrhea and vomit heavily every time I took the medicine. I never gave up because I wanted a child. I once visited my husband when getting my dose but everything turned chaotic as he had married another woman who had given birth. They have a son now,” she said.

She insists that she will still go back to her the TBA if she needed another child since she has enabled her bear her first child whose father is a man she confesses having slept with for the first time to check on how effective the medicine she took for a month had been. She calls Mrs. Osago ‘daktari’, a Swahili word for a doctor.

“I moved to a house next to daktari’s home so that she can always attend to my situation. She detected my pregnancy a week after trying it with a man and after two weeks she told me I would give birth to a baby boy. It all came to pass and am happy because of her.” She says.