SAMBURU (KENYA)
Associated Press
Oct. 9, 2019
When Sabina Losirkale went into labor, her sister Scolastica recalls, priests and religious sisters filled the delivery ward waiting to see the color of the baby’s skin — and if their worst fears had come to pass.
Scolastica and dozens of villagers peered in from behind the clinic fence, as well.
A nun screamed. The boy was white — “a mzungu child,” Scolastica said, using Kiswahili slang.
“How will we cover up this shame?” the sisters fretted, she recalled.
The shame that brought this baby into the world: An Italian missionary priest, her family alleges, impregnated this Kenyan girl when she was just 16. But the nuns need not have worried about the scandal spreading.
The priest — who to this day denies paternity — was transferred, and a Kenyan man was found for Sabina to marry. He would be listed as the father on the boy’s birth certificate.
The church’s efforts to conceal what is alleged to have happened here would stretch over three decades — a testament to the extraordinary ways in which church officials have dealt with accusations that priests in the developing world have had sex with girls and young women. Here, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis is just beginning to force a reckoning.
The boy who was born to Sabina Losirkale on that day in 1989 has been an outcast of sorts for all of his life. Tall and light-skinned, with wavy hair, Gerald Erebon, now 30, looks nothing like the dark-skinned Kenyan man who he was told was his father, or like his black mother and siblings.
“According to my birth certificate, it is like I am living a wrong life, a lie,” he said. “I just want to have my identity, my history.”
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