When Grief gives Birth to a Mission

By Catherine Maina

There is a family in Andingo village, Homabay County in Kenya who do not know what the much-publicized Titanic Submersible is, leave alone why people boarded it.  They may be labelled ignorant by any Western standard but they are normal in Andingo village. They represent every homestead in the village too preoccupied with basic needs to care about a television set, or trending topics. Poverty is their unifying denominator, squalor, the lyric to their song of destitution.

Two kilometers from the village is St. Mary’s Catholic church. The villagers flock here on Sundays. They come here for an infusion of hope into their weary souls. Mercylline Amolo used to come here too as a child. She knows Father Oyioma the local parish priest. Father Oyioma was her family’s pillar of hope when Amolo’s mother died last year.

Amolo’s mother was a retired teacher. The villagers called her Mwalimu, Swahili for teacher. Holding such a formal job was interpreted as being wealthy by Andingo’s standards. You may think of it in terms of selfless service but when you are poor, everything is measured in pounds and pennies. Amolo remembers being in church as a child one Sunday and wondering why her friends wore tatters. Why couldn’t their parents buy them a Sunday best dress like she had? She asked her mother. Her mother educated her about poverty and privilege.

Before she died, Amolo’s mother tried to rescue the village she had called home for half a century. It started with the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, owing to the Covid-19 lockdown protocols, someone waltzed into a widow’s home, raped her, beat her and left her for the dead. Villagers scurrying for a leftover discovered her in the morning. They ran to Amolo’s late mum. “Mwalimu, help!” they exclaimed.

Amolo’s mum was angry. She told Amolo that the main reason why this widow was abused was that she lived in a rickety doorless shanty open to Mother Nature’s vicissitudes and open to agents of darkness. Amolo was devastated. They helped take the lady to the hospital and paid the medical bill. Amolo’s mum did not stop at that. This was the beginning of a long campaign to beat poverty. Poverty has a stench and if you live among it long enough, you either dare to fix it or walk away. The late Mama Teresa Akoth Waga, Amolo’s mother, was not born to walk away.

Merci

As she breathed her last after a short illness, she charged Amolo with continuing her noble work of beating poverty in all shapes and forms in the village. She died trying to do one kind thing. Her husband and Amolo’s father, died a few months later. His broken heart just gave up. The grief was too much for Amolo to bear. It was made worse by her being in the UK alone while all her close family members are in Kenya. “There is no solution to grief Cate,” she thoughtfully told me. “You just learn to live with it.”

Her way of living with it is to continue her dear mum’s work of solving the mystery of poverty, disease and devastation in Andingo Village and beyond. This has seen her rally members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church to run feeding programs and in reaching out to the sick and poor. She works several overtime shifts to get money to send back home to educate this child or take that child to school and build a door for that other widow.

Amolo works as a junior Sister at a National Hospital Service (NHS) hospital in the United Kingdom. She came to the United Kingdom in 2019 and every move she makes at work is geared towards helping live her mum’s legacy. She only wants to spread her mum’s kindness. Sometime sit involves making tough financial sacrifices. This is how she deals with grief of losing both parents in quick succession.

Mama Teresa Golden Heart Foundation clothes the naked and feeds the hungry. She believes if we all looked around us, there is something each of us could do as a show of kindness. Since its inception, Mama Teresa Golden Heart Foundation has secured school admissions for various children.

I highlight a case of Joel (Not his real name) who has cerebral palsy. He was kept home behind closed doors by his family who thought cerebral palsy is some form of bad omen. Amolo has been able to secure a special school admission for this boy and he could not be happier.

Besides education, they run a Sanitary Pads program in schools. Amolo’s holidays are spent in these secondary schools mentoring the young girls and providing sanitary pads to them, an attempt to solve period poverty. It is in these sessions that she teaches sexual health, a topic shied upon in African cultures by both parents and teachers. Amolo misses her mum dearly. But she knows by doing what her mum did to her last breath, then she is even more connected to her in spirit. It helps her be even more empathetic as a nurse

“How can we help?” I posed.

She encourages you to send anything in your closet that you are not using to her UK address. Clothes, bags, shoes, books, children’s toys--anything that you have not used in the last six months means you can easily donate it.

She tells me she will take extra shifts at the hospital to afford shipping costs to Kenya. Her address is 30A Woodman Hurst Road, StamfordleyHope SS17, 7RX. She is appealing to all nurses in the United Kingdom to help her. She is appealing to all Kenyan nurses in the United Kingdom to help her deal with the grief of losing her parents, the only way she knows how to. By being Kind.