Of late, there have been reports in the media concerning the inhuman plight of overseas Kenyan labourers, especially those in the Arabian Gulf region.

Calls have been made on the government to be more responsive in helping its citizens who face problems in other countries, especially the overseas workers.

The plight of such workers is not unique to Kenya per se, but one that is an epitome of migrant labourers from developing countries to developed or relatively wealthy nations.

Women migrant domestic workers are the worst hit and tend to suffer grave abuses including physical and sexual violence, food deprivation, and confinement in the workplace.

Even migrant male workers are susceptible to similar grave mistreatment at the workplace as their female counterparts.

For instance, the Al-Jazeera TV network reports that many South Asian workers are leaving their homes and families for the promise of money and security in Singapore, only to discover they have been duped and no jobs exist.

They end up being broken men, destitute in a foreign land. These migrants who travel looking for a better life are said to be living on charity, and are worse off now as a result of the effects of the recession.

Indeed Asia supplies much of the world’s migrant workers with the International Labour Organisation noting that the region could have up to 22 million people without a job this year.

Experience from the Philippines, a country known for exporting a large pool of labourers around the world, has equally been faced with such cases among its fleet of legal and illegal overseas foreign workers.

In efforts to streamline government intervention and support, the country established the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) in 1982 to promote and develop the overseas employment program, protect the rights of migrant workers, regulate private sector participation in recruitment and overseas placement maintain registry of skills, secure best terms of employment for overseas foreign workers, reinforced regulatory function, and protect the rights of OFW as a worker and human being (http://www.poea.gov.ph).

An average of 3,000 clients and as much as 5,000 clients are noted to be served by the POEA main office daily.

Clients include Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), Licensed Recruitment and Manning Agencies Foreign Employers/Principals Applicants – Workers/ prospective applicants, NGOs, media, and the general public. It is time that Kenya equally adopts such an institution.

But equally to blame are workers who opt not to use established channels to enhance their protection and labour rights while on contract employment abroad. This is no different in the Philippines where the government has been called upon on several occasions to intervene in a number of cases.

For a start however, it is time Kenya establishes structures akin to the POEA to promote and safeguard the interests of workers seeking greener pastures as contract workers abroad.

After all, foreign worker remittances have greatly helped many countries earn much needed foreign exchange, Kenya included. Our large pool of unemployed youth is indeed a ‘gold’ mine whose talents can be well utilized abroad for the sake of development.

Satwinder Rehal

Manila, The Philippines

Living in a Nairobi slum, she adds a newborn found in a plastic bag to her brood of four children and seven orphans. The problem of abandoned infants is significant in Africa, activists say.

Agnes Awori already had 11 children to care for when she decided to take in a newborn baby left in a plastic bag on a railway track near her home last year. She named him Moses. (Robyn Dixon / Los Angeles Times / December 24, 2009)

By Robyn Dixon

December 25, 2009

Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya

Agnes Awori is hurrying to the market, early afternoon. She sees a cluster of perhaps two dozen people on the railway track. Probably the usual thing, she thinks: someone killed by a train.

The 53-year-old widow, who lives in the Kibera slum outside Nairobi, doesn’t have time to waste: She has 11 children to support — four of her own, the rest her dead sister’s. But she can’t resist the twinge of curiosity tugging her to the tracks.

Turns out it isn’t a body, just a plastic shopping bag. It’s been lying there at least four hours, someone tells her.

It moves.

“It was a human being,” Awori says. “He was just dumped there, with his umbilical cord. He was naked, as he’d just been born.”

Awori’s heart sings. She will save this baby.

As she gently picks him up and cuddles him, the women in the crowd laugh at her. She carries him away, a stream of ridicule and laughter pealing in her ears.

“Some said, ‘Don’t you have work to do?’ Others said, ‘You can’t leave your work for that. You can just sell that child for 10 shillings.’

“I didn’t care,” she says. “It hurts my heart to see a human being thrown away.”

She calls the baby Moses.

::

Child abandonment is disturbingly common in urban townships and slums in many cities across Africa. One of Awori’s neighbors rescued a baby girl from a pit latrine. Awori says unwanted infants are often dumped in the river next to the slum. Many of the babies don’t survive.

There are no statistics on child abandonment in Kenya or South Africa: Some infant corpses are probably never found. But anecdotal evidence from charities involved in child rescue suggests it is common.

“It doesn’t happen sometimes. It happens a lot,” says Tahiyya Hassim of New BeginningZ, a child rescue charity she set up eight years ago in Pretoria, South Africa, after a car accident left her wondering what she had contributed during her life.

In March 2008, Hassim established an anonymous drop-off point in Pretoria called the Wall of Hope where mothers could abandon babies without repercussions.

“Before I put the wall, it was a case of the police phoning me on a weekly basis, saying, ‘We have found another dead baby in a dustbin or a park or a toilet,’ ” Hassim says.

Since then, 17 babies have been abandoned at the wall. The number of dead infants found in the area by police has declined, says Hassim, who has interviewed many young women about why they left children to die.

“They are often so desperate they don’t have any alternative,” she says. “A lot of the girls we spoke to said how horrible the treatment was that they got from social workers at state clinics. The social workers tell them, ‘You made the baby, now deal with it.’

“Often girls have been raped by relatives like brothers or fathers.”

She recently created a second drop-off point, but faces opposition from the government’s Department of Social Development, responsible for child welfare, which told her she was encouraging women to abandon their children.

“We are just trying to prevent children from dying in the street,” Hassim says.

::

Sixteen months after she rescued the baby on the train tracks, Awori sits in her one-room shack. She rocks constantly, Moses dozing peacefully in her arms.

Thirteen people live behind the red curtain in the doorway of Awori’s shack. Moses is the youngest. The oldest child is 15.

The room is divided in two by a blue drape. Behind it lies the bed where the widow sleeps with the smaller children. The bigger ones sleep with her neighbors.

A rusted bicycle frame is suspended under the roof, holding a bundle of firewood for cooking. In one corner, she has pinned some cardboard religious paintings, like a shrine.

A daughter, Elizabeth, cuts Swiss chard into thin strips for sale at their vegetable stall. They have fewer customers since election violence in late 2007 and early 2008, many of their best ones having moved away.

Awori relies on credit from shopkeepers to feed the family. She makes about 200 shillings (about $2.65) a day and has accumulated about 10,000 shillings (about $132) in rent and food debts in the last two years. She keeps sinking further into debt.

“I am just praying that God will open his own way for me,” she says.

Awori says that when her children get older, she’ll work hard and repay the shopkeepers and landlord, in installments.

“I’m happy in my life,” she says, still rocking Moses. “I’ll bring him up well, like these other orphans. Everyone has their own talents in life.”

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

Shops were destroyed on Monday at Muthithi trading centre in Kigumo in an attack blamed on Mungiki gangsters. Kigumo is one of the areas in Central Province people fear visiting during the festive season. Photo/ JOSEPH KANYI

Thousands of people are staying away from their rural homes this Christmas for fear of crime.

It is a Kenyan tradition for urban dwellers and those who work away from home to spend Christmas with family in the village, popularly known as “Shags”.

For many Kenyans, family gatherings are an opportunity not just to be with loved ones, but also to send careful signals about how well they are doing in the cities.

Thus, those who do not own a car hire one, shopping is done on a wholesale scale and there is a tendency towards generosity at the village bar.

But this year, these simple Christmas pleasures are denied many working class and well-off people by local gangsters and extortionists, especially in Central Province and parts of the Rift Valley.

It has become almost a tradition for bands of young hooligans to attack homes and terrorise families which have visitors, the assumption being that the visitor must have brought money or gifts.

This nature of crime has become so serious that in parts of Murang’a, Kiambu and Kirinyaga, dowry is no longer paid in cash. Instead, the groom is asked to write a cheque or make a deposit in his would-be in-law’s bank account.

“We are aware relatives, including elderly women, are being robbed soon after their children have left. Gangsters are on the lookout for new faces whose hoes they target,” said Kigumo DC Omar Salat.

Causing fear

Like most areas of the larger Murang’a District, Kigumo is a Mungiki stronghold and the DC warned that other criminals could exploit the sect’s unsavoury reputation.

“Criminals are causing fear. Some have made it a tradition that they “must be seen” before a dowry ceremony can go ahead,” he said.

The gangs are very active this season and specifically target “people from Nairobi”, a phrase describing anyone who does not frequently visit.

“If they do not attack you at dusk, they attack your home when you are gone,” said Mr Kamau Chege of Wethaga location in Kiharu.

Mr Chege has been attacked once and his mother twice after he visited in his new car.

A businessman from Kariguini village in Othaya says he no longer visits his rural home. “I have not gone there for Christmas since 2002. When I go, I sneak in at night and leave at dawn because if they see me, the gangs will come and demand money,” he said.

Instead of his children visiting their grandmother, he takes them to Mombasa and send money to his parents by M-Pesa. “It is quite expensive but it is safer for me and my parents,” he says.

The trader, who asked not to be named, said the gangs seem to have an elaborate intelligence gathering system. “They know who came and who did not. They know who has been doing well financially. Cars are no longer parked outside the gate as wheels are stolen,” he said.

Join forces

The Kenya Alliance of Residents Association (Kara) said its members live in fear.

“There is a lot of fear over there. Some of our members would rather spend the night in a hotel than at home,” said chief executive officer Stephen Mutoro.

Elite urbanites, especially from Central, are “living a lie” by thinking all young people at home have joined Mungiki, he said.

“If they invested some of their money in the youth and engage them directly, then they would have nothing to fear,” said the Kara boss.

Police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said poor infrastructure made it difficult to patrol. Visitors and villagers must join forces against crime, he said.

“Let them go home and join hands with the local community and confront the problem. If they do not go, that makes them internally displaced persons,” he said.

The Central provincial administration said it had beefed up security in the Mungiki strongholds of Murang’a, Mathira, Kirinyaga and parts of Othaya.

Police officers on leave have been recalled and all leave suspended until after the holiday.

The General Service Unit has been in the area since the Mathira massacre, where suspected Mungiki members slaughtered 29 villagers.

In Naivasha, Ms Isabella Wanjiku is a sad mother and grandmother. Her children will not be visiting her this season. She has been attacked three times this year after family functions.

“I have told them not to come as I fear another night of terror,” says the elderly businesswoman and church leader. She declined to have her picture taken for fear of reprisals.

After hosting a get-together for her children on New Year’s day last year, her home was raided two days later by nine armed youths demanding cash “in dollars and goodies from America brought by the visitors.” They stole more than Sh20,000 and mobile phones.

And two months ago following a visit by a teenage grandson, more than six thugs stormed her house, demanding money they suspected the boy had brought her.

“Your children drive flashy cars. They must have left you lost of money. Even if you scream, we are used to it,” they threatened. They took Sh3,000 and a mobile phone.

One of her daughters, Rachel Njeri, says this is an outrage. “This is the height of impunity,” she said.

Naivasha police have offered security next time the old woman has visitors, but to how many families can the service be extended?

Small house

Naivasha CID boss Gilbert Makanya told Nation that 24-hour surveillance has been mounted in crime-hit areas.

However, not everyone thinks urban dwellers have legitimate security concerns.

Some say they have no “home to come back to”.

“Some of these fellows drive big cars but do not have even a small house to sleep in,” said Nyeri Chamber of Commerce and Industry chairman, Dr Mwangi Macharia.

Reports by Billy Muiruri, Muchiri Karanja and Macharia Mwangi-Daily Nation