A father’s agony as daughter goes missing... and the Good Samaritan who finally reunited them

On the afternoon of Monday, October 19 this year, Nimrod Orina walked into Nation Centre clutching a photo of his three-year-old daughter Dorcas Mochama Ndinda. He cut a forlorn, beaten figure. He looked disturbed, and it was obvious, from the bags forming around his eyes, that he had not slept well the night before.

Dorcas was missing, he informed the News Desk once he settled down. She had disappeared the previous day while playing with her friends at the Kwa Uwanja neighbourhood of Eastland’s Pipeline area, and he was almost going mad looking for her.

Several other children had been abducted while playing in the area in recent months, and Orina feared for the worst for his young child.

Orina wanted the Daily Nation to help in the search of his daughter.

He had spent the previous few hours searching all over Eastlands for Dorcas, made calls to relatives far and near, knocked on the counters of every police station within a few kilometres of Kwa Uwanja, but still there was no sign of his daughter.

The Daily Nation told him he needed a police Occurrence Book number to help trace the case with the authorities and, dejected but promising to come back with the OB number, Orina stepped out of Nation Centre and melted into Kimathi Street, carrying with him the only memory of his daughter that offered him both comfort and torment: a photo.

As the Nation team prepared to follow up the matter with Orina the following day, he arrived again at our offices, this time holding his little daughter’s hand and beaming with joy.

They had reunited after 48 hours of agony and desperation, and that reunion had dramatically transformed the father.

Where he had walked to our offices a sorry, distraught and weather-beaten man who seemed and sounded quite uneasy with everything around him, he now had regained the spring in his step and the eyes dazzled under the bright lights of Nation Centre.

His daughter was safely back in his life, and all of a sudden that life had become meaningful once again.

Here, a recap of every parent’s worst nightmare, as told to us by Orina:

SUNDAY

10.30am: After breakfast, Dorcas leaves the house and goes outside to play with her friends. She has been playing in the same place since she was young and so her parents have learnt to ignore the parental impulse to keep checking on their young one every few minutes.

12.00pm: Her mother, Mary Wanza, who has spent the morning attending to Dorcas’ two younger brothers, goes outside to look for Dorcas so that she can have lunch but realises that she is not outside with other children.

She asks the other children to rush to their respective homes and check whether she decided to make impromptu visits but each one of them comes back with a disappointing answer: “No, she is not in our house.”

1.00pm: Wanza, now realising that something is greatly amiss, decides to leave the other children in the house with their father and move from house to house looking for Dorcas.

The estate has more than five flats, and after knocking on hundreds of doors, she returns home empty-handed and almost hysterical. As time goes by, she realises that all of Dorcas’ friends are within the estate but she is nowhere to be seen.

2.00pm: As Wanza and Orina run helter-skelter within Kwa Uwanja, a drunk man comes across Dorcas at a bus stage opposite Taj Mall, a few kilometres away. She is crying and asks him to take her home, but she cannot give directions.

She got lost after she walked away from the estate with a group of new children who had gone to play in her neighbourhood.

Now alone and everything looking unfamiliar, she was stranded. She needed to go home, but she did not know how to get there and, at three years old, could not give coherent directions to anyone who would care to listen to her. The man listens to her but realises he is not going to have an intelligible conversation with Dorcas, and so, having lost his patience, he takes her hand and helps her cross the road to the other side of Outering Road.

He is taking her towards a woman who is boiling maize by the roadside.

2.20pm: Dorcas has been missing for more than half a day now, and the drunk man hands her over to the woman cooking maize by the roadside and asks her to stay with the child until her mother or someone who knows her finds her. Even in his state of intoxication, he warns the woman, Margaret Wambui Kariuki, against impostors who might want to steal the now desperate child.

As he walks away, he instructs Wambui to ensure the child does not leave her sight, lest she gets lost again. And then the man disappears into the cacophony of the Taj Mall precincts.

2.40pm: Dorcas’ mother Wanza slings one of her babies — a seven-month-old son — on her back and takes the other — a two-year-old son — to a neigbours’ house so that the neighbour can help take care of him as she searches for Dorcas. She leaves the estate and goes deeper into the other parts of Pipeline. Meanwhile, father Orina leaves to go to the Kwa Njenga Police Station to report the disappearance of the child.

4.00pm: Orina goes back to the house to get a photo of Dorcas, which he intends to use to make posters announcing the disappearance of the child and distribute them in Eastlands. He then returns to the police station to record a statement and leaves his mobile number with one of the officers on duty. After that, he proceeds to other estates to try and look for his daughter. Every few minutes he keeps calling the police station to inquire if anyone has reported a lost-and-found child, in vain.

8.00pm: Both mother and father converge back home, still with no news about the whereabouts of their daughter. They then decide to post pictures of her on social media asking friends to share widely across all social media platforms. One of the friends states that there had been a report of a found child on one of the TV stations, prompting the family to call the TV station only to discover that the child reported by NTV was a boy and had been reunited with his parents in the morning. Orina pleads with his friends to continue sharing the information on social media.

11.00pm: As the rest of Nairobi climbs to bed to sleep, Orina decides to go back to the Njenga Police Station to check if there is any report of a found child. Police officers tell him that no report has been made and advise him to also report to other police stations in the surrounding estates.

They tell him to go back to the house, and that they will call him if they receive any new information. Dejected but still hopeful, he goes back to the house for the longest night of his life yet, which he spends agonising over what could have befallen his beloved daughter.

His wife, who has been trying to appear composed, breaks down in tears, and through the night Orina tries to calm her down while wrestling with the emotions trapped in his chest.

MONDAY

5.00am: Orina, who has not slept a wink overnight, heads to the Embakasi Police Station to check if there are any reports of a found child.

There is none. He proceeds to Tassia Police Station, then to Dohnholm Police Post, and to all the Administration Police posts within Embakasi, but none of them has any information concerning the missing child.

He decides to go to the By Grace Kindergarten, where his daughter goes to school, and while there he makes an appeal to the teachers to announce the disappearance of Dorcas.

The head teacher announces the disappearance to the other pupils and asks them to inform their parents about Dorcas. The teachers and pupils hold a prayer for the lost girl.

9.00am: One of the teachers, sensing the hopelessness and helplessness that is creeping on Orina, leaves her duties at the school and offers to take him to the Plot Ten Police Post to report the disappearance of Dorcas. There, like at any other police station he has been to, the police record his report in the Occurrence Book and ask him to go home and wait for them to call him. At about the same time, a friend calls Orina and gives him an idea: go report the disappearance of Dorcas to the media so that they can make it public.

2.00pm: Orina heads to the Nairobi Central Business District to report her daughter’s disappearance in the media, but the managers of the first TV station he walks into inform him that they no longer advertise lost children.

The second, a radio station, tells him that it would only announce the disappearance of the child after 72 hours. At Nation Centre, reporters note his story but request for details of the case’s OB number, which he does not have at that point, to authenticate the story.

Now Orina is experiencing first-hand — and at the worst possible time — how the process of meticulous fact-checking in newsrooms can cost someone so much. Without an OB number, the journalists inform him, it would be hard to follow the story with the police, who are key players in the scheme of things.

Orina, who has reported the case to different police stations, says he would bring the OB number(s) as soon as possible, leaves us with photos of Dorcas, and heads home.

6.30pm: Dorcas’ mother Mary Wanza calls the child helpline within the Kenya Police ranks after a suggestion from neighbours and registers yet another reports about the missing child.

She also hopes that the police officer on the other end will give her information regarding a lost and found child but no such report had been made.

7.45pm: As night falls and the Orinas prepare for yet another long night, a teacher at By Grace Kindergarten, where Dorcas schooled, calls Orina and asks him to go to his house because he wants to take him to meet someone who says he might have seen Dorcas somewhere. He asks him to carry a picture of the child. At the teacher’s house, the two pray for a miracle and then leave for the informer’s residence near the Kenya Builders neighbourhood of Eastlands.

There, the informer, a woman, tells Orina she had seen Dorcas in the company of a woman who sells boiled maize near Taj Mall earlier in the day.

The woman, who had been with Dorcas since Sunday, was requesting people to spread the word that she is hosting the child.

The informer confirms to Orina that the child she had seen was the one on the picture he had carried. Finally, there is some light starting to shine at the end of the dark tunnel Orina has been trudging in.

8:00pm. As Orina starts to chase the leads he has been given, Wambui, the woman hosting Dorcas, decides to do what she should have done tens of hours ago: report that she is hosting a lost child at the nearest police station. She walks to Embakasi Police Station, where the child is booked in and offered some rice and beans for dinner, which she rejects. Instead, she informs the police officers, she would not mind some French fries, but that is not available on the police menu.

Wambui tells the police she would go home with the child, but on the way home decides to take Dorcas to her son’s place so that Dorcas can play with other children.

She then goes back to her maize boiling base to earn a few more shillings before calling it a day. Her schedule has been disorganised by the trip to the police station, and so she has not met her daily targets.

9.20pm: Orina, the teacher, and the parent have decided they would not sleep until they confirm whether indeed the child the informer saw was Dorcas. They head to Taj Mall, where they find Wambui packing her stuff, ready to retire for the night. Orina shows Wambui his daughter’s photograph, hoping for the best. The woman lights up, and Orina, for the first time since Dorcas went missing, feels his hear skip a beat.

“It’s her!” Wambui beams. “It’s her! She is at my son’s place right now. Follow me!” As they walk off, Wambui tells Orina that several women had come claiming the child but could not prove any parental links with Dorcas.

She also warns Orina that ownership of the photo is not proof that he is Dorcas’ father, and that she would have him arrested and locked away for a long time if it turns out he is not the child’s father.

11.30pm: As the clock nudges towards midnight, the group arrives at the house where Dorcas has been staying. However, the child they have come to see, they are informed, is fast asleep, so they will have to be patient as she is woken up. Orina paces around. He has a feeling that his daughter, lost for two days now, is sleeping in a room here, but he is not 100 per cent sure.

He wants to confirm the details as soon as possible. He can’t wait. It’s been long. Too long. He can’t wait. Will he cry if Dorcas steps out of that room? Will he be able to contain his emotions? Will he dare show any sliver of weakness in the face of his daughter, who believes he is the toughest man around? Will he.... He is still fighting the emotions boiling within him when Dorcas calls out to him.

And then after that everything else becomes one, long, blurry canvas of emotions. He calls his wife to give her the good news, stays in the house to thank Wambui for all she has done to take care of his daughter, and then, a few minutes past midnight, father and daughter walk home.

TUESDAY

8.00am: Orina wakes up and together with his daughter leaves the house to go to the Embakasi Police Station to report that the child had been found.

They then come to Nation Centre in the Nairobi CBD to report the good news. In his pocket is the OB number he promised to bring, but this time it is just another piece of paper with no value to him, for the story had changed.

And so end the worst 48 hours in the life of Orina, who will be seeing his daughter via a new rainbow of emotions that is likely to last a lifetime.