Family Abandonment: The Hidden Emergency No One Talks About
Tirop was 12 years old when he first faced the brutal possibility of losing his right leg. Not because of war, not because of a rare disease, but because of something far more common: neglect.
The kind of neglect children inherit from the poor decisions of the adults around them.
He lived with his grandmother, Mama Cherono, in a home that had long stopped being a home and had become a warehouse of broken promises. Five children — his younger brother, two cousins, and himself — all dumped into Mama Cherono’s lap like forgotten baggage. Not out of her free will. No. She was handed this burden by tragedy, cowardice, and the ruthless carelessness of grown-ups.
Tirop’s two cousins were fatherless — their father had died young. The mother, barely a woman herself, had abandoned her sons in a cloud of shame and whispered curses, muttering something about Arap — sons of the dead. As if grief was something her young boys could carry alone.
Then came Mama Cherono’s own daughters — both drawn to men who made promises like they were throwing pebbles into a river: easy to make, impossible to retrieve. Each left behind a child, as though their children were loose ends they no longer knew how to tie.
So Mama Cherono, already old, already tired, already poor, became the reluctant guardian of five children who had done nothing wrong but be born into other people’s failures.
The daughters claimed they needed to move to Nakuru town — to find work, to make money, to “build a better life for the children.” That’s what they said.
But promises are cheap. They asked Mama Cherono to care for the children for “just a short time,” while they found suitable accommodation. A few weeks. Maybe a month. Two at most. That was four years ago for one daughter, six years ago for the other.
They came back from time to time — polished nails, new hairstyles, cheap synthetic perfumes clinging to their skin — and always with fresh stories. Elaborate, theatrical stories.
“Mama, the landlord says no children until we finish paying the deposit.”
“Mama, my job keeps me working night shifts — it wouldn’t be safe for a child right now.”
“Mama, the schools here are terrible. Let them stay a little longer while I sort things out.”
The stories mutated, grew legs, changed shapes each visit.
The truth was simpler: They had slipped into new lives where the burdens of motherhood had no space.
And Mama Cherono, too decent to throw her grandchildren to the wolves, too proud to beg, and too old to fight, bore it all in silence — her back bending a little more with each broken promise.
She fed them, clothed them when she could, watched them grow with tight jaws and a bleeding heart.
The kind of injustice no one writes about.
The quiet kind.
The slow kind.
The invisible kind.
Tirop lived in the same compound with his father and mother. Technically, he had parents — both alive, both fully capable of raising him. He was not like his cousins, abandoned by mothers who vanished into town life. No, his case was worse in its own quiet way.
Because Tirop, even at twelve, carried a kind of burdened awareness most adults around him lacked.
He was a sensitive child. Observant. Thoughtful.
And what he saw carved wounds into his young heart:
The way his grandmother, Mama Cherono, had grown smaller over the years — not in body, but in spirit. How the spark in her eyes dulled as one grandchild after another was left behind.
How her laughter, once strong and full, now dissolved into polite chuckles — like someone trying to make peace with grief.
And Tirop saw something else too.
He saw his parents — living yards away, yet turning their backs to the quiet suffering in the house , with which they shared a compound.
His mother, always full of excuses —
“Mama Cherono understands that I have so much on my plate.”
His father, always busy with things that conveniently kept him at arm’s length —
“The boys are better off there. After all, Mama raised us too. She can manage.”
The hypocrisy stank.
Every day, Tirop watched adults move like ghosts of responsibility — present in body, absent in duty. And so he began to help. Quietly.
Carrying water, chopping firewood, fetching groceries from the market, soothing crying babies. He did the work of adults — not because anyone asked him to, but because he couldn’t watch the weight crush Mama Cherono while others stood by with clean hands.
He shouldn’t have had to.
But dignity is rarely distributed fairly amongst kin.
Until the accident.
It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. School had closed early, and Tirop, as always, hurried home to help.
The rains had been cruel that season, pounding the tin roofs at night, turning the compound into a slippery mess of mud and loose stones. The family’s small pile of firewood had grown dangerously low, and Mama Cherono had murmured about it in the morning: “If this rain continues, we won’t even have dry sticks to boil porridge.”
Tirop had heard her.
He always heard her.
So while the younger ones napped under the thin patched blanket, and Mama Cherono sat sewing an old dress by the fading light, Tirop grabbed the old panga and headed toward the edge of the compound. There, behind the granary, lay a fallen tree branch that had been too heavy for Mama Cherono to drag. Wet, but still usable. Firewood was firewood.
The panga was dull. Its handle loose.
He had told his father weeks ago that it needed fixing — but his father had dismissed him with a wave:
“Don’t touch that panga again, Tirop. Let the adults handle it.”
But there were no adults here when it mattered, and gogo would not be left to handle this matters alone.
He swung the blade with awkward strength, trying to hack smaller pieces from the log.
The branch twisted. His foot slipped on the wet ground.
The panga veered off course.
In a flash of pain and bright red, the blade sliced into his right shin — deep, ugly, raw.
Tirop screamed.
The world narrowed into pain and terror.
Mama Cherono came running, barefoot, her eyes wide with a mix of panic and exhaustion that only the truly helpless know.
The wound was deep, and blood pulsed through Tirops fingers as he tried to clutch it. The old woman pressed rags against it — an old shirt, anything she could grab. There was no clean gauze, no antiseptic, no sterile bandage. Only desperate, trembling hands.
The nearest clinic was miles away. The main road had been blocked all week — trucks stuck in the mud, they said.
The nearest matatus were more than two kilometers away. Mama Cherono had no phone to call either his mother or father for help.
And so they waited.
They waited as the wound bled.
They waited as the infection from the rusted panga crept in.
They waited while the swelling rose like a poisonous balloon.
By the time help arrived — a neighbor with an old bicycle who finally risked the ride into town — Tirop’s leg was hot to the touch, his fever climbing, his body shivering.
At the hospital, the nurse shook her head.
“You people… you always wait too long.”
As they waited for the doctor, Tirop and Mama Cherono sat side by side on the hard wooden bench. His leg was propped up, wrapped hastily in soiled cloth. The pain throbbed, but for a moment, the room felt strangely quiet.
Their eyes met.
No words. Just a long, heavy glance.
Both carried something unspoken in that moment — a shared knowledge of struggle. Each had tried, in their own way, to hold up the other.
Mama Cherono, stretching thin the small coin she had. Tirop, too young to carry burdens, yet quietly shouldering the gaps adults left behind.
They were allies in a silent war that others couldn’t see.
A war not of violence, but of abandonment. A war of being made invisible by those who should have stood in front of them.
They both knew: the others wouldn’t understand.
Not the nurses. Not the relatives who appeared during holidays with gifts and loud voices. Not even Tirop’s own parents, who lived just yards away but had long outsourced their responsibility.
In that glance, they held each other up.
Because no one else would.
This is how emergencies happen.
Not suddenly.
Not unexpectedly.
But step by painful step — through carelessness, avoidance, and the indifference of adults who should have known better.
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Muthoni Thangwa 