Charles Mutembei.

So he ran out screaming and calling his grandmother. By the time the granny arrived, the mother was already dead. He watched in pain as they prepared his mother for burial, there was no morgue within reach.

So her burial was hurried. They kept saying he didn’t understand his mother was dead. He could hear them discuss him and conclude that he wasn’t hurting or grieving. Soon after that his father took him, fled from home and sold the land where the mother is buried. (At this point he said when he gets his own money he will go back and buy the piece of land where his mother was buried just so that he keeps his mother’s respect). They moved to a different village.

There, his father married another lady who had two younger children. He would then become their babysitter. Since his father was a drunkard, he never brought food home to his stepmother and so she turned her disappointment to Charles.

She would beat him and send him to bed without food. One day she came home and he had committed a minor, childish offence but she took some boiling water from the stove and poured it on him, shouting “You are useless, I’ll kill you”. He ran away from home. He trekked many kilometers far away from his stepmother’s house determined to never turn back. In the process he lost his way, someone found him in the market and took him to the children’s office and that’s how he found himself in our programme.