Refuge Girls' House
The Tumaini Centre
in Meru, Kenya, gives abused girls a safe haven and a perspective for the future. Above all, however, they find comfort and friendship here. In the common room of the Tumaini Center, Risa sits on one of the worn sofas and strokes her stomach, lost in thought. Although she is only 5 months pregnant, he looks grotesquely tall on the 14-year-old girl. "I lived with my uncle's family because my parents can't take care of me. One night my uncle came into my bedroom..." Her voice breaks and her gaze is lost in the distance.
Risa is one of 20 girls currently living in the Tumaini Centre in northern Kenya. The youngest is five years old, the oldest 17. They have all fled violence in their families, some from genital mutilation, others from extreme neglect, but most from sexual violence by family members. From her father, from her uncle, from her cousin. Almost all girls of childbearing age are either pregnant or already have a child.
15-year-old Joy is an exception, she escaped her family without getting pregnant, but that didn't make her story any less harrowing. She was raped by her cousin and told her father. But that made everything much worse. "My father said I damaged his honor. He announced that he would abandon me out in the bush so that I could be eaten by the hyenas."
"The worst thing is that the girls were betrayed in one way or another by people they trusted. This makes the experience even more traumatic than it already is," explains Joice Kuria, who provides psychological support to the girls. "When they come here, they are completely scared, some cry all the time, others don't utter a single word for many sessions."(...)