NAIROBI — When Leroy Blessing went missing, his family panicked. The autistic 9-year-old could not talk to strangers easily, and police in his native Kenya scoffed when his desperate parents sought help, saying he was old enough to look after himself.
“They said ‘he’s a big boy, he will come back home,’” Ketty Omondi, Leroy’s mother, recounted. “They never received me with kindness or pity.”
Then Maryana Munyendo stepped in. She heads Missing Child Kenya Foundation, an alliance of voluntary sleuths tracking down missing children. She plastered up posters and blasted social media. A stranger called two days later with the boy’s whereabouts.
Since setting up the group in 2016, Munyendo said she and her two-person team have reunited 1,055 children with their families out of the 1,551 missing children that parents have reported to her. Another 153 were sent to government homes and 28 were declared deceased, leaving 315 active files.
Munyendo, 41, set up the group after a 10-year-old girl went missing in the neighborhood near her office. Locals spotted the lost child after Munyendo put up posters, and the girl was reunited with her family after two days. More families reached out. Buoyed by early successes, Munyendo and her friend Jennifer Kaberi set up the foundation, running it on a shoestring out of Kaberi’s living room. Many of the children were runaways or the victims of parental abductions or traffickers. Some were simply lost and unable to tell strangers where they lived.They started with posters, social media and the introduction of online hashtags and the keywords “MissingChildKE” to bring up names and posters. Then the group expanded, setting up Kenya’s first toll-free number for tracing missing children and badgering local news organizations to air features on the missing.
