What Kate Copstick and her charity has to deal with on a daily basis in Kenya

Feared comedy critic,  outspoken journalist and former on-screen sidekick of the Chuckle Brothers, Kate Copstick has been in Kenya for the last two-and-a-half weeks. It is where her Mama Biashara charity works.  

She keeps a diary while she is there. Here are a few recent, brief, very, very highly edited excerpts which give a slight hint at some of what she has to face on a daily basis.

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Sunday 27th January

I sleep in. I took my methotrexate injection yesterday evening and am beset by mild nausea and dizzy headachiness.

Tuesday 29th January

It promises to be a packed day. I have to go back to Kenyatta Hospital, this time to help the Mary Faith Home get a girl – Faith – who is being detained there (ILLEGALLY) because her bill has not been paid. She is 14 years old. 

She was raped by her father. She gave birth two weeks ago, since when she has been held there – in a ward where expectant or postpartum mothers sleep two to a single bed (or on the floor) with their newborns. A victim of incestuous rape, she is now sharing a bed with a stranger. 

I meet the matron of the maternity ward. 

The matron (if, indeed, this stone-faced, acrylic-haired person IS the matron) is completely disinterested in the fact that what they are doing is illegal. The girl, she intones, should have got medical insurance. 

The first thought, of course, of any 14 year old raped by her father, would be: Note To Self, get medical insurance just in case I am pregnant by my rapist father.

I can feel an unhelpful outburst bubbling and I stomp out. 

We go and see another lady who is Kenyatta’s One Good Person. She is not happy. She phones around. She speaks to the right people. And NHIF (Kenya’s fairly new National Insurance scheme) will pay the bill. And she will ‘have a word’ with the supposed matron of the maternity ward.

“I am very much like you,” she says to me. “Perhaps we are sisters.”

I am very flattered.

We go and deliver a pair of crutches (thank you Age UK (Hammersmith & Fulham)) to Kibe, who is delighted to be home from Kenyatta.

We hear more horror stories from inside Kenyatta. The number of people who go there and simply rot away is terrifying. And, once they have you in your 1,500 Kenyan Shillings per day bed, they will put every obstacle in the way of a transfer out. 

“It is hell,” says Kibe. “Hell”. 

I get back to Corner and get a call. The girl Faith is still in “hell”. 

I did not get the details but, when push came to shove, the hospital refused to let her go.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Thursday 31 January

We had another bomb in Nairobi earlier in the week. But it was hardly in the news at all. I think a couple of people were killed and about twenty injured. 

However, it was in quite a skanky part of town: Odeon Roundabout. The people around there are mainly hawkers and other people who are: 

1. not rich 
2. not involved in international politics 
3. not white.

And so the rather big explosion was not reported. 

It worries me much more than the big internationally covered bomb at Westlands.

I spend quite a bit of time near the Odeon Roundabout and loads of people I know/have funded have workshops there. No idea what might be in it for Al-Shabaab to attack.

I have been feeling a bit odd – utterly exhausted (for no reason) to the point of not being able to get up stairs and bad headaches – and this morning is not a great morning.

We make for Jamibora. It is the weirdest of places. A sort of gated community of stone houses which was apparently funded by a white bloke so people from the slums could get a better life and a new home. 

People started saving with Jamibora Bank, very little by very little, to buy their new home. And then the houses were sold over their heads to people with ready cash. 

It took, says my friend Mwangi, years for them to get any money back. Oddly, most of the houses are empty but one is owned by another Mama Biashara lady who made the most of her grant and is yet another of our network of ‘safe houses’. 

Today’s groups looking for funding from Mama Biashara have come from Loitoktok and elsewhere in Kajiado County. Far away, basically. They did not feel safe meeting in Kitenhela or Sultan Hamud (our original plan) so we are out here in a safe house. 

The people’s problems are the same. These are all groups of other tribes living in Maasai communities. Now the Maasai want them out. They are physically and sexually assaulted. I get a list of attacks with spears, knives, rungus (big heavy stick with a knuckle on the end) and pangas (machetes). 

It is very hard for them to use the word rape. They will say “They hold the children” or “They take the children” or describe it as “bad behaviour” or “unsuitable behaviour” and I have to push and push to find out what any of this means. It means rape. 

I apologise to them and explain that it is important to know. And to use the words that tell the truth. I tell them (last resort) that Jesus said, “The truth will set you free”. They are very impressed and mutter “Amen”. I feel slightly dirty. However we do get some more details. 

In one group the main problem is that the Maasai men want to marry the daughters of the group. And this means enforcing female genital mutilation. They are becoming quite insistent and the mothers are terrified.

A call to the Mary Faith Home confirms that Faith is still being illegally detained by Kenyatta Hospital. With her newborn child. Mary herself was so stressed today that she had a bit of a moment and fainted. Her blood pressure is, she says, worryingly high. Mine is generally low but if anything could turn me hypertensive, the goings on in Kenyatta Hospital can.

Friday 1st February

I go to Milimani Law Courts. This is where Lady Justice Wilfreda Okwany sits. She is the judge who made the game changing ruling in October last year. That ruling states that it is illegal for a Kenyan hospital to detain a patient for non-payment of fees. Illegal. But the law of Kenya “does not apply here” according to the staff at Kenyatta. 

I am thinking the good Lady Justice might be able to help me help them see the error of their ways. A tailored jacket and an authoritative manner go a long way. As does a document file under the arm and a grasp of legalese. But people are very helpful and very quickly I get to meet her clerk. The Lady Justice is on holiday (confirmed by a couple of people and a quick look at the register) but I have her clerk’s email and I am putting together a document which I hope she might read. Fingers crossed, anyway.

On the way back, Facebook tells me the British comedian Jeremy Hardy is dead. This is just another example of the world being too unfair to be the project of any kind of thinking deity. Jeremy was a wholly, honestly, hilariously brilliant political comedian. And a totally decent human being. 

Just in case he is listening from The Place Where The Good Guys Go, he might be amused by the conversation I had with David as we reach Corner. 

“You are very silent,” says David. 

“I am sad,” I say. “A very good man has died.” 

There is a pause. 

“Cancer,” I say. 

David nods. 

“Which cancer was it ?” he asks. “Was it the prostitute cancer?”

I smile all the way the Mary Faith home to drop off the beads for more Happy Bags. 

Faith is still not out of Kenyatta Hospital. Still illegally detained. But now she has locked herself in a toilet because the court (The hearing was today but she could not go to identify her father as the man who raped her because Kenyatta will not release her) told her father she was in Kenyatta Hospital and he sent one of his goons (who have already tried to get rid of her once) round to the hospital. Luckily, Faith saw him before he saw her and locked herself in the loo. A 14 year old rape victim. 

I am going to try and find someone in the media who will help. And talk (if I can get a contact) to the BBC who have a MASSIVE place here. 

The monsters are among us. 

I think it is time we got among the monsters.

I can feel my old documentary making roots tingling.

… CONTINUED HERE …

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Mama Biashara exists totally on donations and from sales of goods in its shop at Shepherds Bush, London. The website is HERE.

Kate Copstick: The real, horrific details of female genital mutilation in Kenya

Continuing edited extracts from Kate Copstick’s diary. She is currently in Kenya, working with her Mama Biashara charity.

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Copstick in Kenya with Mama Biashara co-worker Felista

SATURDAY

For the first time this trip I am a bit meh when I wake up. It has been incredible this trip. I have not so much looked at a painkiller. And nothing has swelled up, crusted, oozed or turned a funny colour. I thought I might be cured.

To Corner for food. Today seems to be the slaughtering-the-chickens day at Chicken Master. There is a LOT of blood around and piles of feathers and bits in the little room beside the entrance. And the smell of death. And piles of plucked chicken ready for sale. I have rice and cabbage.

I check on Doris who is deep in the forest outside Limuru with our next batch of terrified mothers with raped children desperate for the chance to flee their rapist husbands.

My phone abruptly dies. Falls off its perch. Becomes an ex-phone. Not pining for the fijords. Dead. With my life inside. Cos stuff doesn’t get saved to the buggering SIM card any more does it ???? NO !! It is about 7.30pm. To say I panic would be… well, OK I do get a bit unsettled. I set off through Corner and find a phone kiosk.

“Ah! – It just needs a charging,” says the young man. “The betri is veeeeeery low.” Fifteen minutes later he looks at it and says: “It is dead!” It is some sort of newfangled solid state thingy and the battery is non removeable. Without the phone I have no internet. WhatsApp. Messenger.

I get a piki piki – and immediately regret saying I need to get to Junction fast – I get to the phone shop in Junction just as it is closing. I get a slightly soiled ex-display techno-something for about £9. And I am phoneable. But with no numbers. But at least I am contactable.

I get back up the road to Corner. While online I get news that the compound in Rombo now has most of its fence, is about to get a gate and is looking gorgeous in blue and yellow. All paid for by Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project. But nails and bits of wood and whatnot are surprisingly expensive.

I go to bed convinced amazing things are happening online and I can’t see them. Sob.

Nais – “She is not living in fear any more.”

SUNDAY

I meet Nais. She is fifteen and Maasai from the Rift Valley. Her father killed her mother and then burnt down the house with the body inside. Nais and her brother were taken by her maternal grandmother to her village to live. However, being fifteen, Nais knew what was coming and she ran away. And travelled on foot, sometimes thumbing lifts, over a period of a month and a half, to Nairobi. Desert country. She was found by the police who brought her to Felista.

Now she is not living in fear any more. She is a charming young woman. After we get her story I ask if I can ask “a hard question” (Nais speaks Swahili but not yet English). I ask if she has been ‘cut’ (ie female genital mutilation). She says no, but that was why she ran. It was the season of cutting.

And now I see something I would never have thought possible – I see Felista shocked and totally discombobulated.

I ask Nais if the cutting is done the same way as in, for example Rombo. She says the old ladies use a pair of big scissors. Think tailoring shears. The same pair for all the girls that get done that day.

“What do they take away?” I ask.

“Yote” she says. Everything.

Felista’s mouth gapes.

“And then they put goat fat and cow dung?” I ask.

Nais nods. Although in the Rift Valley they sometimes use Kimbo (cheap cooking fat), possibly because a mere girl’s butchered undercarriage is not worth wasting good goat fat on. They also put sugar on the wound, for some misbegotten reason. And then periodically wash it with cow urine.

Felista is aghast. And incandescent with rage.

“I am hearing this for the first time and I cannot believe!” she says. “Why are these people not in prison? They will arrest people who were with Raila in the park… doing nothing… but they will not arrest people who do this to young girls?”

She is also furious at the many many many NGO who get quite a lot of money for supposedly educating about and opposing female genital mutilation.

“They do not tell you the truth,” she says. “They are just being polite because they do not want the wazungu (whites) to see how backward are these people. They should say the truth!!” And then, more surprises. “They just say ‘the cut’,” says Felista. “But there are many cuts. I was cut… everyone born 1959, 1960, 1961… We were all cut. But not like this!”

The Kikkuyu tribe traditionally cut girls. And women up to the age of 49. Although it has more or less stopped now.

Felista explains that, by the time she was cut, there was only one old lady who was doing it. When Felista was taken to her she told her that they would have ‘a secret’. She would cut Felista but not the full cut because she did not want to do that any more. So she bifurcated (split in two) Felistas clitoris.

“And then you put a leaf on,” says Felista, explaining the post-operative procedure. She makes a V sign with her fingers and waggles them. “It is also very good for the man”.

I am silent.

“But that was not like this !!!” says Felista, gesturing towards Nais. “We must mobilise. But we must meet with the shoshos.” She grabs my arm. “You cannot win a game with a fight. You win a game with a game.”

According to Nais there are a load of old ladies who earn about £12 per butchering. And, given there are no gloves, no disinfectant, no cleaning of the scissors and that goat fat and cow dung are readily available, that is pretty much pure profit.

Felista is fired up about joining our anti FGM arm of the Phoenix Project.

She reckons we can do a deal with the old ladies. Persuade them to stop (for cash, obviously) and create some sort of ‘pretend’ FGM involving sanitary pads and fake blood. No-one looks to check it has been done, says Nais. And no-one comes into the manyatta with the girl when it is being done. So only the girl and the shosho know what is really happening.

That is how it stopped in other tribes. When the old ladies do not do it any more, the practice just stops. For once, the power is in the hands of the old ladies.

When I come back in April, Nais will take us out to her grandma’s village and we can see what happens. And Felista is all for creating a home for runaway Maasai girls in DECIP. I have never seen her this worked up. I think it is a lot about never having been told the whole truth that is outraging her.

“You should be telling people,” she says, poking me in the chest. “You are on the ground.” I am indeed. “I think they are working from offices,” she says, doing a fair mime of someone at a computer. And it is true that the many many many many anti-FGM NGOs (it is a killer pitch if you want funding nowadays) tend to pussyfoot around a bit.

They do a lot of talking and never quite get round to calling a spade a bloody spade. There is a lot got away with under the blanket of what is, broadly, political correctness. And the government do very very little in terms of stopping it.

It is understandable (not forgivable but understandable) because he who takes on the entire Maasai nation would face an absolute nightmare of a reaction. With the Maasai you do not fuck. Really.

“They are worse than the Meru men,” says Felista.

Alarmingly – although FGM is illegal in Kenya (like THAT has made a difference) – a bloke called Kamau is working (with quite a lot of support – even from women) to have the law overturned and FGM legalised again.

CONTINUED HERE