MJoTA lights a candle for Nairobi. SJ Dodgson. MJoTA 2013 v7n2 p0923.
Nairobi is a beautiful city. Driving past Uhuru (which is freedom) Park, driving through the streets and through Westlands. You can see what it is like, was like, from videos below.
I was in Kenya in 2008, sent on a mission by a man who had not properly thought through the mission. I believed I was gathering data to get a hospital funded, and on this mission, I lurched alternatively from success to disaster because of a series of coincidences and mis-steps which culminated in a weekend during which I was detained as a suspected terrorist for 19 hours, watched Olympic Games events of television with Nairobi police officers, went to a mega church to listen to a sermon on the power of positive thinking, and was diagnosed and treated for malaria at the MP Shah Hospital. The help and love I got from my hosts Dr Charity Gichuki and Mwai was unconditional and went far beyond duty.
Africans love all sons and daughters of Africa, of Europe, of the Americas. If you are upright and can breathe, and have made the effort to visit them, they love you. Unconditionally. All you have to do is breathe. They take you in, they will feed you, clothe you, give you money for transportation, make sure you arrived safely where you are going next, and always be interested in how you are doing. If they have nothing to give you, they will give you food that should have gone into their own mouths.
I know sons and daughters of Africa whom I believe are not Africans. Some presidents of African countries who are "elected" presidents for life and who take money that is needed for security, and use this money to send their children on first-class plane tickets to Harvard or Yale University. Or use the money to rig elections through public relations firms or through physically dumping votes.
My highest compliment for any human is to tell a person he or she is an African. Every day I try to become African, become more African.
Africans in Kenya are rallying together to take care of the sick and injured and families of those murdered in the Westgate Mall Massacre. Kenya has some fine hospitals, my favorite is certainly the Karen Hospital, which you can read about and see pictures I took in 2008, click here.
The victims of the massacre were taken to local hospitals, all 4 of which I visited in 2008.
MP Shah and the Nairobi Hospital are local hospitals, originally set up during the days of Kenyan apartheid, to cater for the sons and daughters of India and Europe, respectively. They remain private hospitals, good hospitals. The 3rd hospital, Kenyatta Hospital, is a free government-run hospital which is overcrowded - I was told the bed to inpatient ratio was 3 to 1 - and lacking equipment and medicines. The situation may gave improved since my visit, which was not long after the post-election violence over-taxed its resources. The 4th hospital, the Aga Khan Hospital, is described in an article below.
I have found some videos that explain Nairobi and the Westgate Mall, and what is going on in Kenya. This massacre is the first major tragedy since more than 1,000 sons and daughters of Kenya were murdered during the 2008 post-election violence. To give an idea about that time, below is a video from the eloquent Martha Karua, who was unfortunately defeated in her attempt to become president of Kenya in 2013. And a video from the proceedings of the International Criminal Court in Holland, which has indicted both the current president Mr Uhuru Kenyatta (yes, the son of Kenya's first president) and the vice president Mr Ruto.
I put this page together because that is all I can do. I wish I could give every drop of my excess blood, I wish I could wash the injured, hug the mothers, fathers, siblings, children of the dead. I cannot. All I can do is mourn in my own way and ask what will it take for the world to understand that in the 21st century having any form of deadly force is absurd, evil, and tragic.
May God grant peace to all those touched by this massacre. Amen.
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Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2009
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Kenya Vice President Ruto on trial for post-election ethnic cleansing at the International Criminal Court in the Hague Sep 2013
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Drive through Nairobi 2010
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Martha Karua, Justice Minister of Kenya speaks in 2008 after the ethnic cleansing murders during post-election violence of 2007
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