The day Amani went home: an abandoned boy reunited with his mother
He was six years old when a market trader in Kisii found him asleep behind her stall for the third night in a row. He would not — or could not — say his name. The staff at our safe shelter called him Amani, the Swahili word for peace. Two years later, his mother knew him the moment she walked into the courtyard.
Amani came to us in July 2023 with a torn school jumper, a single rubber sandal, and a small tin car he would not let go of even while he slept. He did not cry. He did not speak for eleven days.
The first weeks
Our shelter team in Kisii does one thing very slowly and very well: they wait. A bed, a warm plate, the same kind faces every morning. Mama Esther, our house mother, sat beside him each evening and read aloud from a picture book about a lion cub who lost his pride. On the twelfth day he asked, in a whisper, for more milk.
Through play therapy and patient conversations he gave us fragments: a hill with a blue water tank. A grandmother who sold tomatoes. A baby sister called Neema. A bus that was very loud. It was not much. It was enough to begin.
Tracing a family across four counties
Our family-tracing officer, Brian Nyamweya, works with the sub-county Children's Office, local chiefs and a network of village elders. The blue water tank, it turned out, sits on a hill in a sub-location in Migori — 180 kilometres away. The grandmother had passed on. The mother, Pauline, had been searching for her son for nineteen months. She had walked to three police stations and slept outside two of them.
"When the call came through that they had found my child, my legs stopped working. My neighbour drove me to the bus stage. I did not even take a bag."
— Pauline, Amani's mother
The reunion, and what came after
Reunification is not a single moment. It is a season. Pauline spent four weekends with Amani at the shelter before he came home. Our social workers visited the family three times in the first month, then monthly for six. We enrolled Amani at the nearest primary school and put Pauline through our family-livelihoods cooperative — a small grant, a goat, and a place in the village savings group.
Ninety-one days into being home, Amani is in Class 2. He still carries the little tin car in his pocket. His teacher reports that he is shy in the mornings and impossible to quiet by lunchtime. Pauline has paid back the first instalment of her livelihoods loan. Neema, his baby sister, calls him kaka — big brother.
In 2025 our Kisii hub reunified 23 children with their biological or extended families. Eighteen of those placements have held at the twelve-month mark. The work is slow, unglamorous, and the most important thing we do.
Brian Nyamweya
Family-tracing officer, Kisii hub
