This young woman from Girona traveled to Nairobi in September to cooperate for almost a month with a Nairobi children’s orphanage run by the Fountain Of Grace foundation.
Iris is a 26-year-old girl from Girona. In August 2022, she went to TikTok and came across the video of Valentina, an Argentine girl about her age who had traveled alone to Kenya to volunteer with children from Nairobi. She had done it with the help of a local foundation, Fountain Of Grace. Iris then sought more information about that organization and, very soon, began talking to the person in charge of caring for the volunteers and coordinator of the Fountain of Grace Rescue Center in Kenya, LR, who appeared in one of Valentina’s videos.
At that moment, the young Catalan woman did not feel prepared to travel alone to Nairobi to help the children, so she His contribution to the foundation was based for months on sending donations so that the children were well cared for. “I had wanted to go to Africa for many years, but it gives me a little respect, because I have many African friends who told me to never go alone. But this girl – LR, with whom she communicated in English – told me It made a good impression and the people who had gone were fine, they had no problems,” says Iris, who also got in touch with other Spaniards who had volunteered at Fountain Of Grace to find out about their experiences.
When a year had passed since she learned about the foundation, in August of this year, she decided that it was time for her to embark on the same journey that the volunteers she had spoken to had already taken. She bought tickets to land there in September. For a month, she collected all kinds of objects that could be useful to the children and packed them in three 25 kilo suitcases full of clothes, toys and school supplies which would then be invoiced.
Iris donations to the Fountain Of Grace center in Nairobi.
| ASSIGNED TO EPE
From the foundation they insisted that they did not have much access to computing and He asked for cell phones, computers and other electronic devices, but “I couldn’t help them with that,” says the young woman in a telephone interview. She did everything possible to fill the foundation’s orphanage with everything that could be of use to the little ones: “In the school where my sister works they had done a renovation and We wanted to send a container to Kenya with all the old school supplies for children to use. The only thing I needed was to be there to sign some papers. In the end, we didn’t do anything.”
The flight
The trip to Kenya was not difficult for her. She was aware that she was fulfilling “a dream,” but even so she remained “nervous.” On September 11, after changing planes in Amsterdam, she headed to Nairobi. “After making a stopover, I got very nervous and went towards the end of the plane. A man came and sat closer to me, who reassured me by saying that the country was good and that I shouldn’t worry, that it wasn’t going to happen to me. nothing, that he wouldn’t leave me alone until they came looking for me. “I was afraid that they wouldn’t come for me.”.
And so it happened. When she landed, two hours later than expected, as confirmed by her LR, the man who supported her on the flight accompanied her to get some suitcases that had been lost, for which they filed a claim. “We stayed for about 50 minutes and, when I left the airport, the people from the foundation were not [esperándome] and my phone line didn’t work there. That man helped me get in touch with other people from the foundation and gave me the feeling that they knew each other. He told me: ‘I’m coming now.’ And he went to look for people and came with those from the foundation,” recalls this young woman from Girona.
Finally, Iris left with LR and another boy who accompanied her, who, as the coordinator herself explained to this newspaper, was her “husband.” “We lost contact with her and found her crying. Curiously, it was another foreigner who contacted us, alerting us that we had a volunteer who was lost,” says LR, who also states that “It was really late and it wasn’t safe for us to go downtown that day.“.
The night in Nairobi
Since it was already very late, LR decided it was time to go to her husband’s house “to sleep there so we can go downtown in the morning.” The house “marked” Iris, because “it was just the opposite of what I expected.” “I went to an orphanage, where they were very poor and had nothing to eat, and I stayed in a very luxurious house, with a very large television, Apple speakers and headphones, watches… These are details that I noticed and that made me think that they weren’t that bad either,” recalls the young woman, who has been impressed by the smell “rancid and musty for several days” from that home.
“They locked me in a totally African room, with anti-mosquito cloth, with a precarious bed… but the rest of the house was different. In the living room there were cool sofas, not roll benches, as I expected. They told me that We were going to stay there until we resolved the suitcase issue.“says Iris. LR and her husband, who are not older than 30, slept in the living room.
The man spoke to Iris and invited her to be comfortable and use his Wi-Fi. “We spoke through the translator. He told me to be calm, because LR only wanted to solve the issue of the suitcases, since it was ugly for a volunteer to arrive with nothing,” she says. Then, as LR indicates, “Iris told us that her grandfather was sick and that she had to return to her house in Spain. For us it was a shocksince he had just arrived“.
The only visit to an orphanage
LR insisted that they come to the center before going to the airport to meet the grandmother/mother of the orphanage, where they normally care for “25 street children and 200 children from our community.” “In the morning, He told my husband and me that he wanted to return to Spain.“emphasizes the coordinator of the Fountain Of Grace center in Nairobi.
Iris had given “quite a bit of money to the foundation” and He had paid 200 euros – they were asking for 160 euros – for his food and paperwork expenses between September 11 and October 3, which was when his return to Spain was scheduled. Once in the car, “LR picked up my phone and told me not to talk to anyone, that everyone could fool me and that she was the only one I could trust. My phone was unlocked and I I saw how he deleted the phones of the people I could contact: a taxi driver from Kenya, the boy at home and the one who helped me on the plane,” highlights the young Catalan woman.
“He told me that we had to go to the orphanage to see the grandmother, who had a message for me. He didn’t tell me anything at all, he showed me the courtyard, where There was just a scared little boy and she hugged me really tight.. It was a hug that stayed with me, he touched the back of my neck a lot, stretched my hair and squeezed me in a way that I didn’t see as normal. I was only in the house for five or ten minutes,” she says.
Escape from the alleged trafficking network
Finally, LR and Iris returned to the airport. The coordinator of Fountain Of Grace in Nairobi took the young Catalan woman to “some white booths”, where They asked for his passport and took his money, as she reflects herself. “Those white booths were behind the airport, which is small. They were like barracks and were about 50 or 100 meters” from the entrance.
As he explains, LR assured him that those booths represented Police posts, but “There was no one with a badge, no one identified themselves and there was not even any sign that read Police, only one that said Free corruption,” she replies. Iris recalls that a man older than her told her that “I had to leave the money and passport there, because I couldn’t be in that area with my documentation.”
“We got very nervous. He yelled at me and I understand English, but to a certain extent. My head told me something was happening, so I grabbed my passport and ran. until you reach the airport gate. LR and the man who took us there came out after me and he shouted in his language. The only thing I understood was that he was reproaching me for not collaborating with them,” she says, still shocked. For her part, the coordinator of the Fountain Of Grace center in Nairobi asserts that “She wanted her luggage, but we were told that to verify if it had arrived, the airport staff needed her passport,” something Iris “refused to do and the staff refused to let her in.”
Upon entering the airport, she sought help from one of the staff and met a worker to whom she told, through the mobile translator, that she needed help because she believed she was being deceived. “At that moment, They let me in and I lost sight of everyone. That employee accompanies me to the place where a woman who worked for Social Services was. I explained to her what had happened to me, she asked me for the documentation.”
The man who treated her advised her that the best thing she could do was leave Kenya and return to her country, because “those people did not want good for me, “But they wanted to put me in a white slave trafficking network.” “He told me that they would leave everything written down there and that they would do their work from there and he explained to me that, since they were going to call the embassy, I would do my part of the work from Spain.” “he declares. LR insists that It was she who spoke “with an officer who helped her go to check the luggage and that’s how Iris left.” The Spanish Embassy in Nairobi has not responded to this newspaper’s request for information.
Those two workers told Iris that the Fountain Of Grace foundation “did not appear anywhere and that the children had not been documented, so they could have been stolen children.” Iris already had an African SIM card, through which one of her friends sent her her return ticket to Spain.
“I went alone and prepared my papers, I did not go with an NGO. “We are trying to solve the problem of the children with NGOs that are there, in Kenya,” she says, completely convinced. The three suitcases with donations that had been lost arrived at the Nairobi orphanage 24 hours later. But, by then, Iris had already returned to Spain.