Paternity test surprises...local stories

“I just felt like everything I’d known for 60 years wasn’t true any more.”

This is the experience of one woman who has opened up about DNA results that revealed the father who raised her was not her biological father.

This comes a week after DNA results released by pathologists at Lancet Kenya revealed that Sharon Mathias and Melon Lutenyo are biological twins.

The results revealed Sharon and Melon share identical DNA profiles and Rosemary Onyango was their mother.

Melvis Imbaya, who was living with Melon in Kakamega as fraternal twins, was confirmed to be the daughter of Angeline Omina and Wilson Lutah.
Angeline and Wilson are the couple who raised Sharon in Kangemi, Nairobi.

So, what happens when you find out a lot more than you were expecting?

One woman who spoke to the Star said, “I tell everyone, Be prepared if you want to take a DNA test, there could be skeletons in your closet,” Jane Wamaitha said.

Asked why she says that, Jane begins to open up how she discovered that the father who raised her was not her real father. Jane in 2016 decided to take a DNA test “just for fun”.

The youngest of five children had always been intrigued by stories about her ancestors. Curious to see what the test would reveal about her ethnic background, she gave it a go ahead.

There were no surprises as the results revealed her heritage as largely Kenyan. “Nothing exotic,” she laughed.

In 2017, she did another test, this time she persuaded her brother to do one with her too.

SURPRISE

This time there was a surprise. The email with the results included a chart that she struggled to understand - but something written underneath immediately caught her eye: “Estimated relationship: half-sibling.”

Jane assumed her brother had done something wrong when he took the test. She thought that the brother must have left the kit lying in the sun or forgotten that you are not supposed to eat or drink an hour before providing the saliva sample.

“I was mad at him,” Jane says. "I thought - how typical! I asked him to do one little thing and he still couldn’t get it right.

“I tried to rationalise it but at the same time there was this pit in my stomach.”

Jane searched for answers online and learned about the centimorgan - a unit of genetic linkage. Siblings typically have 2,500 centimorgans or more in common but Jenny only shared 1,700 with her brother.

MORE SURPRISES
Tormented by doubt, she asked her father’s cousin, a woman in her 80s, to take the test too. “She was a very sweet person,” says Jane . “I feel terrible that I didn’t tell her the real reason. I said it would be a fun thing to do and promised I’d send her the report.”

Six weeks later Jane was sitting in bed with her iPad when the results popped into her inbox. Unlike her brother, she shared no DNA with her father’s first cousin.

“I could just feel my heart breaking,” Jane said, her eyes filling with tears. “I thought, ‘Oh, my god it’s true!’ My poor husband sleeping next to me had no idea what was going on. I have never felt so alone.”
GUARDED SECRET

Jane told nobody about her findings for several months. Instead she sent DNA kits to her remaining brother and two sisters and coaxed them into giving saliva samples. She had always thought she looked different from them - less tall and less dark - and the results confirmed that she was the odd one out.

Jenny also talked her 86-year-old mother into taking the test. “She was my mom of course, but I wanted irrefutable proof because finding out that the man who had raised me wasn’t my dad shook me to my core,” Jenny says. “I just felt like everything I’d known for 60 years wasn’t true any more.”
ONE YEAR LATER

Jane summoned the courage to bring the subject up with her mother, who was frail and suffering from diabetes. As they sat drinking tea, Jane explained that the DNA test had thrown up some weird results.

“My mom was holding a teacup, she had it up to her mouth and was about to drink but she just stopped and looked at me and her hands started to shake,” She recalls.
“She is a typical Nyeri woman , a strong proud one. I don’t think I ever saw her cry - so to watch her shaking like that was so hard,” Jane added.

“I really agonised about asking her - I didn’t want to upset her, but I also thought that I couldn’t let her die and not have some questions answered because I knew I’d always regret it.”

There was a business owner who lived in the same town as Jane’s family and she remembers that he had always been very friendly with her mother. She asked if this man was her dad. “I said his name,” says Jane. “Her eyes got huge and she asked me how on Earth I’d worked that out.”
Jenny’s mother admitted she had hoped to take the secret with her to her grave. She had never told her husband about the affair, so the man who raised Jane was unaware he was not her biological father - something which Jenny now finds “incredibly reassuring”.

She describes her father, an engineer who died nearly a decade ago, as “an introverted, innocent man” and she feels that he would have been devastated to learn the truth.
“It was like a new bereavement. I went through all these stages of grief,” she says. “It was something out of my control, there was no going back and no way to fix it.”

She found some solace in a book, The Stranger in My Genes, written by Bill Griffeth, a financial journalist who had a similar experience.

“Without his book, I think I would have gone nuts or done something destructive in my life. I contacted him through e-mail, and he encouraged me to write a diary about my feelings and he even read the stuff I sent him which was very kind.”
According to a source at the Kemri DNA lab testing, stories like this are far from unique - across the country. The source that begged for anonymity said genetic testing drags skeletons out of the closet in at least 3 out of the 5 cases they receive for testing.

"Paternity tests are the worst.Most of them reveal that most kids don’t belong to the dad’s that raise them,"She said.

People like Jenny - mostly in their late 50s or 60s - are pretty much in the same boat. Their mothers got pregnant by someone who wasn’t their husband - whether willingly or not. It’s hard to come to terms with, but the practical consequences tend to be limited by the fact that most of the parties involved are either very elderly or dead.

So what happens when a DNA kit reveals the secrets of those who are younger?

Lawrence (not his real name) 32 discovered his daughter who is now 11 years is not his real daughter. He says for years he was in doubt for the daughter did not resemble him at all.

[INDENT]“She is dark ,has this pointed nose and myself am light skinned with a bulbous nose,So last year i decided to take a paternity test without my wives consent.” Lawrence[/INDENT]
After six weeks he received results that confirmed his hunch-the little girl was not my child. He knew this after ten years.

[SIZE=5]CHILD NOT MINE [/SIZE]
When Lawrence’s wife heard this she “looked like she’d got hit by a truck”, Lawrence says.
She turned pale, he remembers, and “had this horrible expression on her face, like when somebody is caught stealing something”.
That night she closed their bedroom door and confessed to a long affair with a man she had met at work. Numb with shock, Lawrence phoned his mother and said he was going to walk out on both his wife and daughter. But his mother stopped him.
“My mom said, ‘Your daughter is innocent in this. She had nothing to do with it. You love her. And biology doesn’t change that.’ So luckily, she talked some sense into me,” says Lawrence. He still left his wife, who he felt was unrepentant, but remained a father to his daughter.
Lawrence says that for a long while he felt utterly alone, because men - in his experience - are reluctant to talk about marital problems. Just one friend admitted that his wife had had affairs, but a paternity test had revealed that he was the biological father of his children.
“Nobody could understand that actually finding out your daughter wasn’t yours is worse than finding out your wife had an affair. A hundred times worse,” he says.
Lawrence told his daughter he wouldn’t prevent her from contacting her biological father - after all he knew the man’s name, address and phone number. But to his relief, she wasn’t interested - she refers to him as “the sperm donor”.
But Lawrence’s son, the younger child who is biologically his, blamed his sister when their parents split up. Lawrence felt this was unfair and said so.
“I told him it’s your mother and what she did that caused the divorce not what your sister did by being born,” he says.
Despite what has happened, Lawrence says he is glad he took the test.
“I don’t have any regrets taking the DNA tests. I’m glad I found out the truth. But I tell everybody who wants to take the DNA test, ‘Be prepared for unexpected results. There could be skeletons in your closet.’”

and yea…CSI…am just a collector of information on DNA issues…that’s all

kutombana inje is normal and expected , but like herpes, be prepared ,shit’s not going to stay hidden

true…kwanza hii story ya kakamega twins imechanua watu…[SIZE=2]among the top google searches ni “dna testing in kenya/nairobi”[/SIZE]

Some Kenyan writers have lifelong problems with him, her, his, hers, he and she.

hehee…ni kuficha identity msee

I hope itafungua wanaume macho kwa sababu kuna ufala mwingi unao endelea huku mtaani.

At least I confirmed last week MY SON is MINE.

[email protected]
To
*********@yahoo.com
2 attachments

Dear *********,

Attached please find a copy of your report. As per our findings, the
alleged father cannot be excluded as the biological father of the
child. The probability of paternity is 99.99% as compared to an
untested, unrelated man of the African American population. A prior
probability of 0.5 was assumed. These results were confirmed by a
second independent test. This means that ****** is the real
biological father of *******. The official hard copy report is available
for collection.

Please feel free to contact us if you need further clarifications. The
official hard copy of your report is available for collection.

:D:D:D:D:D, MGTOW men can’t relate

Poleni kwa wale waliochengwa lakini hii ni hali ya maisha.

oh…but you will…eventually

kibs.co.ke ni gani?

Weuh! Ni kubaya.

sana

CONTACT US
Block 4, Viraj Complex, Mombasa Road opposite JKIA Junction

(+254) 716335266 / 734972158

[email protected]

(+254) 734972158

ohh…ya huko ilichukuwa how long?

Just a week

Monogamy believers’ problems, can’t relate.

Uli lipa ngapi?

again…you too will eventually relate