For nearly two years, seven-year-old Ian Baraka has hidden behind a mask, shielding a face that bandits shattered in 2023.
On Thursday, September 25, at Theatre 7 in Kenyatta National Hospital, that long journey of pain, waiting and courage reached a turning point. Behind the closed grey glass doors, a team of doctors prepared to give him what violence had taken away, his face and his smile.
As the clock ticked towards 8:30am, medical teams in scrubs and masks moved with quiet purpose, gathering for final briefings before a six-hour operation.
On a surgical bed, covered in green sheets, lay the boy whose fate rested entirely on the procedure.
The operation was not just about medicine; it carried the hopes of a mother who had refused to give up.
When Baraka was wheeled in at 8:45am, his small face showed no fear. He smiled with his eyes as Dr Margaret Mwasha spoke to him softly.
Moments later, he let out a sharp cry when the intravenous line was inserted, but soon lay still under anaesthesia as the team took over.
In that room, surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses were preparing for a rare operation, the first craniofacial reconstruction using a patient-specific implant on a child.
The attack that destroyed his mid-face had changed everything. His childhood was interrupted by pain, isolation and stares.
He had stopped going to school and wore a mask everywhere. Whenever children laughed at him, he would ask his mother to remind them that he was not born that way, holding on to the belief that one day, things would change.
That hope kept his mother, Bessy Kinya, going.
“My world stalled,” she said a day before the operation, her voice carrying both pain and faith. Since the shooting, she and her son have never returned to their home in Meru. With no financial help from her husband, she relied on a well-wisher they met at Kenyatta Hospital. “My son loved school. The teachers loved him. He can’t wait to go back to school,” she said.
In the theatre, ENT surgeons began by performing a tracheotomy to secure Baraka’s airway. Nurses worked carefully, sterilising instruments with betadine and setting up for the main procedure.
After the first team stepped aside, maxillofacial surgeons stepped forward, fully scrubbed and wearing face shields. In their hands was a titanium alloy implant made in Belgium, designed specifically for Baraka. It would hold silicone nose, lips and teeth, replacing the facial structure he had lost.
More doctors gathered quietly in the background to watch and learn. The room fell silent as the team positioned themselves around the surgical bed.
In that silence, beyond the lights and machines, lay a child’s second chance at a childhood and a mother’s prayer finally taking shape.