ANASTASIA MURUNGU – 18 years
It was the dimples on the boy; two craters filled with temptations. At 15, Anastasia fell for Baraka who sent her young life in a whirlwind. “It started innocently enough,” she says. “He’d walk me home after school. Or bring me fruits in school.” Then she started skipping school. “I’d get home after dusk and my mother would start screaming at me, asking me where I had been.” They started fighting, slowly at first and then furiously. She’d run away.
“My mother would be all over the village, looking for me, door to door. When I’d get home we’d fight bitterly and she’d weep. I didn’t care. I was in love.” This went on for a while. A year, perhaps. Baraka would tell her, ‘If you love me, you will not listen to her. “But one day my mom said, ‘Fine, do whatever you want. But please do me a favour, go to the dispensary and ask for Njoroge. That’s all I ask of you as a mother.” Dr Njoroge was a soft-spoken man in a white lab coat. He talked to her about early pregnancies and later counselled her on ways not to get pregnant. “At the end of the session, I settled for a five-year implant, Jadelle.”
She moved in with Baraka in a one-roomed mudhouse at Timboni stage, in Watamu where they eked a living. A year later the novelty of love wore off. “It was just too difficult. Plus, my mom was suffering. She’s a single mother, taking care of my three siblings. I needed to be by her side.” With this newfound clarity, she is keen to pursue her passion, catering. She is glad that she is no longer distracted, and that she has taken steps to make sure that these plans are not derailed by situations she can control, like early pregnancy, something she sees a lot happening to girls her age in the village.
She sits under a big tree, swept back into the memory of her early teens. “It pains me what I put my mother through. It does. I should have known better seeing as my elder sister had gotten pregnant early and was now living at home, another mouth for her to feed. She was already dealing with so much, doing odd jobs, looking for money to feed us.” She pauses and looks away before breaking down and crying. “I’d be a mother now if my mother hadn’t asked me to go see Dr Njoroge who is a service provider with the Binti Shupavu program. I’d have gotten pregnant and added more misery to her life and my life. Joining Binti Shupavu changed the course of my life.”