Lady luck has smiled on Briton who wired all his life savings to a supposed Kenyan woman in hope of love, only to be stranded in Nairobi, as well-wishers have secured him a flight back home.
The former UN official Rodrick Lodge, had hoped his savings of Sh15 million, would buy him love but only got frustrations as it turned out to be a wild goose chase.
He had worked for an airline before joining the UN as a humanitarian official for decades in Horn of Africa, including in Kenya.
The 69-year-old got the flight back to London from Nairobi on Tuesday morning after some of his former colleagues at a major airline pooled funds to secure him the ticket.
The man had been stranded in Kitengela, Nairobi where a friend was hosting him.
But his former colleagues learnt of his plight when this paper highlighted it, putting together funds to secure the man a ticket back to Europe.
At home, he said, he has made arrangements with a media outlet to extensively highlight his plight and solicit help from well-wishers and find a path back to normal life.
“Here in Kenya, I doubt if someone could help me because probably, they think that a mzungu is monied. But I have spoken to a media outlet in London that is willing to help me once I'm there,” he told the Star.
Lodge was widowed in 2019 when his wife of 25 years passed on.
But a few years later, he found new blinding love in a Kenyan woman, or so he thought.
Last Summer, a Kenyan woman, whom he describes as a close friend, hooked him up with a 39-year-old woman who vowed to fulfil all his emotional needs, and give him a settled life.
But it turned out that the said woman named Anita, never existed.
The woman, he said, was a mother of two whose sons were supposedly studying in universities abroad.
She lived in Karen, but was constructing a retirement home in Voi, Taita Taveta county.
The love-struck widower volunteered to take over the construction of the house to completion.
“I offered to finish the job and get it furnished so that when I come to Kenya, we just do the wedding and move in,” he said.
Every time he spoke to the Star asking for his plight to be highlighted so well-wishers could come through for him, Lodge often repeated that “I can’t feel stupid enough.”
“I believed that I found love and was so blinded that I didn’t do my due diligence before breaking my bank. What kind of a man was I,” he said.
His tourist visa was due to expire this month.
In December, he came to Kenya ready for a wedding and live happily ever after.
But not having a single picture of Anita, not knowing even how her voice sounded, and not having her phone contact, no one received him.
He had only been communicating with her through another woman named Mary.
Once in Nairobi, Anita said she was in Mombasa and resisted a sustained push to return to Nairobi to meet him.
After giving excuses to not meet him, the man’s money ran out, and the woman stopped communicating with him.