Message From Survivors Is ‘It Can Happen Anywhere’

U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was just wrapping up a meeting with the Kenyan trade minister on the 18th floor of a bank building. Across the street, political officer Dave Robertson was walking past a window on the third floor of the U.S. Embassy. Jael Oyoo, a secretary in the embassy visa section, was working at her computer on the ground floor.

An ordinary day.

The next thing any of them knew, a deafening explosion outside the U.S. Embassy here knocked them down, covering them in glass shards and rubble. Bushnell, cut in the face and hands, made her way down the stairs by hanging on to a banister coated in blood. Robertson pulled himself out of a heap of concrete debris in a daze that was “almost surreal, like a dream,” he recalled Saturday.

“We’re here. We are still alive,” Oyoo called out to rescue workers before someone dug her out and bandaged her seared eyes.

“Are you speaking to me?” she asked a voice beside her bed at Aga Khan Hospital.

Physically and emotionally wounded, the thousands of survivors of Friday’s terrorist bombing know they are lucky to be alive.

At least 147 people died in the twin explosions in Kenya and Tanzania, including at least 24 embassy employees in Nairobi. One of them, a friend of Robertson’s, was next to him.

“I don’t want to talk about it, I just don’t want to remember,” Robertson said, fighting back tears, from his bed at Nairobi Hospital.

The survivors lost their glasses, their shoes and hair clips in the force of the blast. Most important, they lost their sense of security.

For many now, life will divide into “before” and “after” a bombing that will forever echo in their minds.

The wrong place at the wrong time, said several of the survivors, such as Gary Lonnquist, 46, a State Department employee who just happened to be in Kenya for a few days.

“What a trip,” he said with a mouthful of loose teeth and one eye swollen shut.

Or was it the right place?

“I was helping to push some heavy boxes up a ramp to the parking lot,” said Carol Hawley, 47, an Air Force postal supervisor. “The next thing, I was thrown on the ground. But I was physically inside the building. If I had been a bit faster, I would not be here.”

Instead, Hawley winced in pain and licked her dry lips as she awaited a flight out of Kenya on Saturday with a fractured pelvis and vertebra.

“Everywhere you go, there has got to be some risk. It depends on your outlook, I guess,” she said in shock. “We like it here in Kenya.”

No one had thought that Nairobi was a dangerous post.

Kenya was a friendly country in a friendly region. The downtown embassy seemed to put its employees more at risk of encountering pickpockets and purse snatchers than terrorist bombers.

Unlike American diplomats in Beirut or even, sometimes, Jerusalem, embassy staffers moved about freely and fearlessly.

“I guess you never know anymore. It can happen anywhere,” Robertson said.

Bushnell spoke with difficulty over a stitched lower lip of the “thousands who came face to face with evil” Friday.

“I only hope that the depth of sorrow plants some rich little seed that is going to grow and help all of us human beings to stop it, just stop hurting each other like this,” she said.

Many of the survivors said they heard a first blast, like a thud, and some gunfire, but they could not remember the explosion that knocked them unconscious.

Bushnell, who spoke to reporters at a makeshift embassy in the U.S. Agency for International Development building across town, said she recalled being knocked down by the force of a huge explosion and then finding herself in a pile of dust and glass with her arms over her head, hearing a ringing silence.

She walked down the stairs of the Cooperative Bank building, across blown-out doors and broken pieces of wall as the river of wounded grew at each landing.

“There was blood everywhere. As we went farther and farther down, there was more and more smoke. Everyone was bleeding, and the banister was wet with blood,” she said.

“There wasn’t a stampede or panic.”

Outside, she saw an automobile burning--one in which it is presumed the bomb was placed--the broken embassy and collapsed building next door, and little else.

“I was not in good shape to do much sightseeing,” she said.

Bushnell said she is working with the wounded and bereaved, trying to coordinate the arrival of U.S. aid and investigative teams, and looking for a new site for the U.S. Embassy.

“We are working on trying to put ourselves back together again,” she said.