Processions of Pain for Americans, Kenyans

Eleven flag-draped coffins containing American victims of the U.S. Embassy bombing here were solemnly carried aboard a C-141 transport airplane Monday. For Kenyans, the day brought continuing searches at the morgues for missing loved ones--or preparations for tribal burials of many already found.

Looking gaunt after three days of tragedy, U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell stood on the tarmac of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport with Kenyan and American officials at her side for the send-off. All was silent save the military orders to pallbearers in jungle combat uniforms: “Forward, march.”

The 11 caskets were placed one at a time on the plane for a final stop in the United States. The body of the 12th American victim was sent ahead of the procession of diplomats who had come to love Africa but never counted on dying here.

Another grim procession was taking place at the city morgue, where Kenyans arrived to collect their sons and husbands, wives and daughters killed by the ferocious blast or buried alive in the rubble.

There were those, like Mary Kombo, who already had identified their relatives, and, in sorrow, were fretting about the cost of a funeral.

The funeral home would have to be paid, Kombo said as she waited for a car to pick up her sister’s corpse. There would be transportation for the coffin and family members to their ancestral village in Nyanza and then the mona, the traditional wake that will go on for days before and after the burial. For that, cows would have to be slaughtered, mourners would have to be fed.

“We don’t know if anyone will help us pay for this. We are not able to do this . . . a lot of people have problems like this,” Kombo said.

At least she had the body of her sister, Margaret Rading, 31, who supported her family of four on a secretarial job. All around Kombo were families still looking for their relatives who had gone off to work or secretarial school as usual Friday and never came home.

They prayed for a miracle as word spread that rescue workers had heard a tapping sound beneath the slabs of concrete downtown. “Miracles happen; we believe that,” said an aunt of Linda Ndina Maingi, a missing secretarial student.

But as a van pulled up bringing the latest corpses pulled from the rubble, the family joined the others craning their necks to see the remains. This time, it was a young woman--unrecognizable except for a head of braids--and a middle-aged man, bloated and badly mangled, a body that, perhaps, a spouse would know.

A white leather sandal was held up for identification. A dozen people shook their heads and moved away from the nauseating stench.

There was a bank book--Ondeny, Lycia Akini. But no one present knew the name, and the crowd dispersed to await the next delivery.

Some minutes later, a woman burst out of the morgue and fell to the ground, wailing in grief. She had found her husband. “Mama! Mama!” she screamed in her native tongue.

The others stared impassively, having already been through this anguish or knowing that they might be next.

Many of the families were looking for students of a secretarial school in the Ufundi Cooperative building that collapsed behind the U.S. Embassy.

Maingi’s father had dropped her off there that morning for her classes in computers and stenography. “My children were brought by God without our knowledge. We are only taking care of them,” said her mother, Jennifer Maingi.

“He gives and he takes,” her father said.

As soon as a body is found, the family will meet to plan a funeral, which can cost thousands of dollars in a country with a per capita income of $270 a year. There are more than 40 tribes in Kenya, each with its own way of handling the dead, from elaborate burials on the family farm to a quick disposal of the body in the forest.

But whatever the ritual, even urbanized Kenyan families seem to fall back on tradition at times of mourning.

Jennifer Maingi said her daughter was born and raised in Nairobi. She was a city girl. “But we will take her home to Machakos,” Maingi said. “There is no reason to buy land here when we have land there.”

Roger Toka Obed Otolo’s family was planning his funeral Monday night. The 41-year-old engineer and father of three also was caught in the Ufundi building, where he worked on a World Bank development project. He made it out alive but died in the hospital.

A committee of the clan from the Luyia tribe met at his father’s house to discuss arrangements for transporting the body back to their home in western Kenya. Meanwhile, other family and friends gathered in the home of Otolo’s widow, where a wood fire had been lighted and was tended in his memory.

“We will take him back to our father’s ancestral home, where his grandfather is buried,” said Otolo’s sister, Lucy.

Friends and family, visitors to her brother’s home, would contribute money to help pay for the funeral, she said, as concerned as the others about the cost.

Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi has mentioned a national fund to help pay for the scores of funerals for his people, but no one at the city morgue had much faith that they would receive any aid.

“We just want to bury our family members,” said Teresia Gachee, whose brother, William Waithaka Njoroge, died in the blast. “The mess already has happened. We cannot have him back whether the government pays or not.”