Lucia Lusega Musabi

In the Bukhulunya area of Kakamega County, Lucia Lusega Musabi lives in a semi-permanent house where she spends her days because she is completely immobile.

Her daughters left their own marriages to stay at home and provide the round-the-clock care she requires.

She was born in 1937 in Emsali Malinya as one of six children in the family. During her childhood, she spent her time helping her mother with farming, gathering firewood, and cooking meals.

She did not attend school because her family lacked the money for school fees. Missing out on an education locked her out of stable employment opportunities, leaving her with no way to secure a reliable income later in life.

Without formal learning, she had no choice but to rely entirely on manual labor, discovering too late that an uneducated background limits a person to low-paying odd jobs that cannot sustain a household. This reality meant she was trapped in endless physical toil just to scrape by.

After growing up, she married and moved to Bukhulunya, where she and her husband raised eight children. Her husband worked at a hotel, but his income was insufficient, forcing the family to struggle through periods of hunger while relying on odd jobs and farm labor.

A neighbor noticed these ongoing hardships and reported her situation to the Mama Ibado Charity Offices in Amalemba. Representatives visited her home, assessed her living conditions, and enrolled her in the senior’s food program, where she now receives flour, rice, milk, cooking oil, sugar, tea leaves, and salt.

"Life was once a daily struggle of empty stomachs and constant worry over how to survive, but now we no longer sleep hungry, and I have far less stress about where our daily food will come from."

Lucia still needs help because she remains completely immobile and depends entirely on her daughters, who had to abandon their own homes and livelihoods to care for her in their modest dwelling.