Most women would struggle to cope with six sets of twins but for Gladys Bulinya it is even more difficult - as many people in her part of Kenya think twins are cursed. Her relatives will have nothing to do with her, and her husband left her, fearing she was jinxed, after the sixth pair of twins arrived last year. So the 35-year-old lives alone with 10 of her 12 children in a one-roomed grass-thatched house, a few miles from the shore of Lake Victoria. Sitting outside her small home in the village of Nzoia, she recites the birthdays of her children with ease. "John and James were born in 1993," she starts, shading her eyes from the sun's rays. She explains that she got pregnant at high school - but her boyfriend was too young to marry her. Her sorrow then turned to shock, when her own family ordered her to leave the babies at the district hospital for adoption. They told her that the Bukusu people, to which her family belongs, believe twins bring bad luck - and that unless one of them dies, it means certain death for one or both parents. The Bukusu tradition of eliminating the second twin is no longer practised, though occasional cases of infanticide are still reported in rural areas of western Kenya. Forced marriage Luckily, Ms Bulinya says, when her boyfriend's father learned the twins had been abandoned, he took them in and has cared for them ever since. (He is from a different ethnic group, the Kalenjin.) But her troubles did not stop there. Five years later she fell in love with and married a primary school teacher. She was living with his family when she gave birth to her second set of twins, Duncan and Dennis. Fearing she had brought them a bad omen - and that someone would die - her in-laws chased her away. "I was put on a motorcycle taxi with my twins and sent to my father's home," she says. Yet again, however, her family had no sympathy. Still considering her cursed, they did not allow her on to their property. Instead, they quickly organised another marriage for her, to a man 20 years her senior. He agreed to the alliance, she says, as he had not expected to marry at his age. But more twins followed. "Mercy and Faith were born in 2003 and Carren and Ivy in 2005, Purpose and Swin in 2007," Ms Bulinya says. It was the arrival of Baraka and Prince last year, that led to her husband walking out. "I now have to do lots of odd jobs to feed my 10 children because I do not know where he is, and he is also too old to work even if he were around," she says.