Fatuma Swaleh, a 57-year-old woman in Mombasa's Kisauni area, has been having nightmares for four years now.
She loses appetite whenever she thinks of her 26-year-old second-born daughter, Shadia Musa. A mother's love would not let her eat.
Shadia was supposed to be at her friend's house in Bamburi, just over 8km from her house. Instead, and to her mother's shock, she found herself in New Delhi, India.
"I remember that phone call four years ago. It had a strange ringtone to it," recalls Fatuma.
That hot July day in 2017, she was at her station in a health facility in Tudor, where she worked as support staff when that call that would change her eating habits came in.
"It was a foreign number. I did not know anyone outside Kenya who would call me. I thought it was one of the conmen using prank calls," she recalled.
She was shocked when she heard Shadia's voice.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"India!"
"Which India?"
"The one India. Where Indians come from!"
Fatuma's hands became weak, almost dropping the phone.
She became light-headed, feeling her world turn upside down.
Shadia had been insistent about going to one of the Gulf nations to work.
She had had enough of joblessness in Kenya after completing her education at Bi Noor High School in Kisauni in 2013.
However, after all the hue and cry about the hardships, torture and trauma that Kenyan migrant workers experience in the Gulf states, Fatuma would not let her daughter go through the same.
She refused to permit Shadia to go there.
And Shadia had finally seen sense in her mother's arguments, or so Fatuma thought.
"The day before that call, she had told me she was going to visit her friend in Bamburi, whom I knew because she had been to my house several times," said Fatuma.
She did know Shadia had gone on with her plans to travel to one of the Gulf states and the day she said she was going to Bamburi was actually when she was to fly out of the country.
"She thought she was going to Qatar for a supposedly well-paying job in a luxurious hotel but found herself in India," said Fatuma on Monday.
She spoke to the Star at the Muslims for Human Rights offices.
Her eyes, as if in a daze, showed a distance between her body and mind.
"I may not have tears in my eyes, but I am crying inside," she said.
For the first few months, Shadia communicated frequently and even showed a willingness to send money home.
"She sent money home once. However, I told her to save the money so she can start a project when she came back home," Fatuma narrated.
However, soon the 57-year-old suspected something was wrong.
"There was something in her voice that told me all was not well. She tried to hide it from me, but I am a mother. A mother knows," she said.
One day in January 2018, Shadia opened her heart.
And it shattered Fatuma's heart.
She was not working in a hotel. She worked in a brothel.
"She said the people who were managing her had threatened her with dire consequences should she quit," Fatuma said.
They said if she wanted out, she would have to pay them an equivalent of Sh2 million.
This was to cater to the expenses that had been spent on her.
Only then would they release her passport, which they had confiscated immediately she touched down in India.
"They were several girls from different parts of the world including Philippines, Ethiopia, Cambodia, among others," Fatuma said Shadia had told her.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the world, the call girl business she was forced into was disrupted.
The girls were released, but Shadia had nowhere to go.
She sometimes found refuge in friends' houses, doing odd jobs and cooking for people, just to earn that coin.
Sometimes she slept on people's porches or public parks.
"My daughter would go for days without eating," Fatuma said, her voice groggy with pain.
She said this made her completely lose her appetite.
"I cannot eat. Even when I am hungry, that hunger suddenly disappears whenever I think of my daughter," Fatuma said.
According to the mother, Shadia is now eight months pregnant.
She has sought help to have her daughter returned to Kenya, but all in vain.
"If my legs could talk, they would have told of my trips to the different offices I have been to," she said.
Muhuri rapid response officer Francis Auma said this is the second case this year they are handling.
“This is a classic case of trafficking in a person,” Auma said.
Fake recruitment agents work in cahoots with some international human trafficking syndicates.
“They hoodwink gullible people that they are being taken to other countries for jobs only to end up in different countries doing different jobs,” Auma said.
The most common victims are Ethiopians, he said.
Mombasa is the most used human trafficking route.
“We have cases where Ethiopians and Tanzanians are trafficked to South Africa through Mombasa,” Auma said.
He said lack of jobs in Kenya pushes girls to desperation, leading to erratic decisions that end up hurting them.
“Kenya has no elaborate policies and programmes to stop human trafficking, which takes different forms,” Auma said.
He called on the Foreign Affairs and Interior ministries to work towards ending human trafficking in the country.
Auma said in a different case they are handling, another Kenyan girl was arrested in Turkey with Sh2 million in fake currencies.
“She was used by some Nigerian man to smuggle the money into the country. Now she is rotting in a Turkish jail,” the Muhuri officer said.
In some cases, Auma said, those being trafficked to South Africa end up dead and their bodies are thrown in Tsavo.
“The weak who get sick and die are left behind. We have found four bodies of dead people in Tsavo. Their identification indicated they were from Ethiopia,” Auma said.
Edited by Henry Makori
