- Ayiecha forgot his mother tongue, Ekegusii, and only speaks Kimeru and Kiswahili.
- An old friend gave him Sh2,000 he used as fare from Meru to his home in Nyamira.
He disappeared from home 45 years ago while Jomo Kenyatta was the President of Kenya. Nyamira town was a handful of mud-walled shops where cows and goats grazed most afternoons.
Some of the children born in 1975 when Ezekiel Ayiecha left his Nyangoge village have grandchildren today.
He had gone to Mt Kenya forest to join many other young men who worked as lumberjacks.
There were no mobile phones then; the best means of distant communication being the hand-written letter sent by post.
After failing to hear from Ayiecha for years, everyone in Nyangoge assumed Ayiecha was dead.
But 45 years later, Ayiecha, now aged 70, has returned to his village, a sick and frail old man.
He forgot his mother tongue, Ekegusii, and only speaks Kimeru and Kiswahili.
A nephew who was aged around 10 when the man left home identified him.
Born in 1950, Ayiecha, the second born in a family of seven, went away as a young man upon completing his primary education.
“We decided to leave the then Kisii district and go to Mt Kenya where we engaged ourselves in lumbering for our income,” the old man told the Star in an interview on Friday.
Life became unbearable for him and his group of four after a while and they moved to Tigania East in Meru county where they continued felling trees and making timber for sale.
In the late 1980s, his three colleagues decided to return to Nyamira but Ayiecha decided to stay.
Besides lumbering, he embarked on tobacco farming on a small piece of land he acquired.
Mzee Ayeicha recalls that he married a Kikuyu woman in a year he does not remember. But when he fell ill, the mother of two left with their children. He has never seen or heard from them since.
“While I was in Meru, I got married but when I became sick and was admitted at Meru General Hospital awaiting a surgery, she ran way with my two children. I cannot recall their age, though they were going to school,” he said.
"My health had worsened and I could no longer go to my job of lumbering or go to my small piece of land to tend to my tobacco. That was when I started thinking of coming home,” Ayiecha said.
At Meru General Hospital after a successful second surgery, he could not clear his medical bill to be discharged.
The hospital management eventually decided to let him go free of charge.
“The hospital management did not have an option but to discharge me since I could not afford to clear my bills. After I left the facility, I boarded a matatu from Meru town to where I was staying and I never paid anything,” he recalled.
His journey from Meru to Nyamira started when he arrived home from hospital. He met his long time friend he only identifies as John who offered to help return to Nyamira.
“John told me there was no need for me to keep on suffering and yet he could help me get home. He gave me Sh2,000 which he told me would enable me to get home. I boarded a matatu from Meru to Nairobi for Sh1,000,” he recalled.
From country bus station, he boarded a Kisii-bound bus that dropped him at Ng'oina junction on the Kisii-Kericho road. He spent the night in the cold and early the next morning took a matatu to Ikonge and then to his home in Nyagoge, Borabu constituency.
His brothers were astounded to see him.
“I was very young when my brother left and I cannot recall anything since he is too far older than me. At some point, I concluded my brother was no longer alive since I had waited for him for quite long,” said Jackson Ouru, the last born.
Edited by Henry Makori