‘For the love of my brother’

How many times have you received a windfall, say, an unexpected sack full of fresh vegetables straight off a farm, and rushed to share it with your siblings?

Or, when you receive your annual bonus, thought of sharing even a little bit of it with your brother or sister just because of the bond you share?

For Florence Kyalo, sharing everything she has – and she doesn’t have an awful lot – is not something she has to think about twice, especially when it comes to her ‘baby’ brother, Mwanzi Kasuni.

When I first meet Mwanzi, my first impression is that he looks like one of the characters in the comic series-cum-Hollywood film, Fantastic Four; the really strong one with the body that is made of stone.

Mwanzi suffers from a skin disease that quite frankly makes him scary to look at.

But after a few minutes of interacting with him and understanding his medical condition, it becomes easier to look past his appearance and into the warm personality inside.

We sit outside his house in Kabiria, a little beyond Riruta Satellite, in Nairobi.

The structure is a humble one-room affair; some of the walls are reinforced with polythene paper.

The warmth with which Florence welcomes me to her brother’s house diverts my attention from the poor surroundings.

“Welcome and please feel at home,” she says with a smile. “Mwanzi, our visitors are here,” she calls, heading inside the house.

Then she comes back outside holding a wooden stool in one hand and supporting her limping brother with the other.

Private joke

“This is my small brother,” Florence says teasingly, as Mwanzi smiles at the joke.

At 39, he is hardly “small” but compared to her 49 years I guess he will always be ‘baby brother’ to her.

Florence pulls up a rusty upturned steel drum and sits on it, next to Mwanzi who takes the stool.

The two exchange a glance and burst into giggles, perhaps at some private joke or at the excitement of an interview.

Mwanzi’s eyes are two bright spots in the midst of all the hard layers of skin on his face – the result of many years’ accumulation of dead skin cells that have piled since 1980.

In ‘normal’ cases, the skin is constantly regenerating, with the old, dead cells falling off naturally.