BBC: David Kuloba’s mother warned him about going to Russia after he accepted a job as a security guard advertised by a recruitment agency in Kenya.
At first the family, who live in the Kenyan capital’s crowded informal settlement of Kibera had been excited when he said he had found work abroad – it sounded like a rare break.
The 22-year-old had been doing casual labour in Nairobi – from selling groundnuts to construction jobs – and had long hoped to secure work in the Gulf.
But when his mother asked which country he was heading to, his reply shocked her.
“He showed me his phone and said: ‘Look, it’s Russia,'” Susan Kuloba told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
“I told him: ‘Don’t you see what they show on TV about Russia? It’s never good,” she recalled.
But her son insisted the offer was genuine, telling her he had been promised more than $7,000 (£5,250) on arrival – a life-changing sum for a young man with no stable income.
Despite her protests, he travelled to Russia in August without telling her the exact date of his departure.
She was shocked when he contacted her later, saying he had arrived and sending a photograph of himself in full combat uniform.
“He told me: ‘Mum, the job we were told we came to do has been changed, but even this one is not bad,'” she said.
