Kevin J Kelley
10 September 2008
New York — A Kenyan woman held a United Nations forum spellbound as she told how the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi had plunged her into poverty and depression.
Ms Naomi Kerongo on Tuesday sobbed at one point during her eloquent presentation to the first-ever international symposium on victims of terrorism.
Recalling the day "darkness descended on our beautiful city in the sun", Ms Kerongo said the bombing brought about "death, pain, confusion and despair".
Mr Henry Kessy, a survivor of the simultaneous embassy attack in Tanzania, then placed a supportive hand on Ms Kerongo's shoulder in a conference hall at the UN headquarters.
At the time of the blast, Ms Kerongo was working in Cooperative House as a trade development officer for a Government ministry.
Flying glass scarred her face, resulting in an operation six months after the attack as well as a two-year stay in a Nairobi mental hospital for treatment of severe emotional and psychological distress.
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had sent Kenyans "a blood-stained postcard from the pits of hell", Ms Kerongo told her hushed audience in New York.
In an interview with the Nation, Ms Kerongo said medication meant to alleviate her suffering had turned her into a "zombie".
Unable to continue working, the single mother lost her home in a Government-subsidised estate and moved to the Mukuru slum along with her five children.
Being abandoned
Ms Kerongo, who holds a degree in accounting from a university in India, said she has tried to provide for her family in Mukuru by charging neighbours three shillings to use a pit latrine she built near her shack.
"For 10 years now," she recounted at the symposium on Tuesday, "the survivors of that act of terror have silently wept as we tried to make sense of our lives and carry on in dignity despite being abandoned by a society of which we were productive members."
Many wounded by the blast, including herself, "require constant medical attention, which is inaccessible to us in a country that does not have State-sponsored medical insurance," Ms Kerongo added.
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