The Line That Killed A Family’s Hope: A Widow’s Fight for Survival

In rolling hills of Kisii County, there’s a small place called Boronyi sub-location. It’s here, in Kiogoro Sub-County, that we found Nancy, a woman whose life, once stable, has been brutally stripped down to bare survival. Nancy is a widow, and that single word carries the crushing weight of her reality. Her nightmare began when her husband, the bedrock of their little family and their sole breadwinner, was electrocuted. He had climbed a tree he was pruning, a simple, mundane task, and tragically fell onto a live power transmission line. He was gone, and with him, the family’s entire future. The cruelty didn’t end there. In the confusion, the shock, and the desperate grief, no one knew the complex, cold procedures to seek compensation. The power company moved on, but Nancy and her children were left behind, utterly alone, with a loss that had no financial safety net.

Today, Nancy and her children are barely clinging to existence. Home is a mud single-room makeshift house; a structure that offers little comfort or true shelter against the elements or the harshness of their fate. We recently tracked Nancy down in a nearby tea plantation. She was there, head bowed, desperately seeking casual day labor. The answer, heartbreakingly, was “no.” That empty-handed walk back home is a routine anguish. The most immediate casualty of this relentless poverty is her youngest son, Alloys. He is just a little boy in Grade Two at Boronyi Primary School, but he has been sent home because Nancy cannot afford his school fees. A child’s education—his only chance for a life different from his mother’s has been abruptly interrupted .

Their days are a constant, gnawing hunger. The family hardly affords three straight meals in a day. They exist in a state of profound deprivation: they lack clean water, adequate food, basic clothing, and even electricity to banish the darkness of their single room at night.