Kenya’s Festering Wounds

It’s a miracle that Lucky Wavai was ever born. His mother, seven months pregnant, was seriously injured in last year’s bombing of the U.S. Embassy here when chunks of glass were blasted into her stomach. She wanted to terminate the pregnancy because she feared that her baby was already dead.

Today, Lucky’s right limbs remain slightly paralyzed. Doctors fear possible brain damage. And loud noises terrify him.

His mother, Caroline Muthoka, is still nursing deep wounds in her head, arms, chest and abdomen. Like thousands of other survivors of the terrorist attack, she is having trouble paying her medical bills.

“We’re still suffering,” said Muthoka, 28, a computer operator who was on the 19th floor of a neighboring building that bore the brunt of the explosion. “We still need full support.”

The Aug. 7, 1998, blast killed 213 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded more than 5,000 others. Eleven people died in a nearly simultaneous bombing at the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Tanzania.

The absence of long-term assistance, along with fear that the world has simply forgotten their plight, is what most troubles survivors and the families of the dead.

Few have come to terms with their predicament, the majority still overwhelmed by medical ailments, psychological trauma, disfigurement and disabilities that prevent them from working. With family breadwinners lost--80% of the Kenyans killed were men--rent, food bills and school fees are impossible for many to pay.

“In Kenya, what you have is the added element of poverty,” said John Sparrow, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, “and it’s pushed many people over the edge.”

Although the United States has donated most of the bomb-related financial assistance--$42.3 million so far--many Kenyans feel that America has not done enough.

After all, “it was a U.S. affair,” said Edmond Ikutwa, 36. “It just caught us Kenyans in the middle.” His wife was killed in the blast, leaving the unemployed accounts clerk with three boys, aged 7, 4 and 3, to take care of. Hundreds of Kenyans are seeking compensation from the U.S. government with the help of American lawyers.

U.S. officials insist that they are doing the best they can to help survivors of the tragedy with the resources available. Aid money is going toward such things as mental health treatment, school fees for orphaned children, reconstructive surgery and the revamping of destroyed and damaged buildings and businesses.

“No amount of money is ever enough after any disaster,” said Stanley Dunn, coordinator of the Nairobi-based bomb response unit of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He stressed that the U.S. is financing a strictly humanitarian assistance program.

“This is not a compensation or settlement of claims program,” he said. “The United States was as much a victim as Kenya of this horrible event.”

Hundreds of Kenyan survivors, unwilling to sit on the sidelines, have joined forces to form a self-help organization called Visual Seventh August. The group is committed to providing moral and emotional support for as long as it is needed.

Seeking to have the group registered as a nongovernmental organization, its leaders say they want to focus on trying to get donor backing to help set up an emergency rescue center that would assist in any future national disasters.

Their aim is also to ensure that financial aid intended for bombing victims reaches the intended recipients. Group leaders complain that many of those affected by the blast have yet to benefit from U.S. donations.

“We appreciate what is being done by the U.S. Congress,” said the organization’s chairman, Douglas Sidialo, a former marketing manager who was blinded in the explosion. “But we still feel they should do something more to ensure that we are well supported and our future is well taken care of.”

Seventeen people have been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors in New York as members of a broad-ranging terrorist group allegedly run by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden; and the U.S. government has taken out full-page advertisements in Kenya’s local papers offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of remaining suspects.

But that is little comfort to most Kenyan victims, whose suffering has been compounded by the daily hardships typically faced by most here.

Simon Maina Macharia, 33, was struggling to make ends meet by selling milk near his home in a sprawling inner-city slum before the blast. The explosion took away the use of his left hand, still held together with iron pins, and left him plagued by bouts of depression, regular blackouts and an even more wretched existence in the dilapidated one-room tin shack he shares with his wife and their five children, all younger than 8.

Sammy Nganga’s waking hours are filled with anxiety over his trek to the hospital for almost daily treatment of his shattered left leg and the glass still buried in his head.

Julie Ogoye, 34, fears that the sight remaining in her right eye will be lost. Her left eye--blown out of its socket and then reattached--continues to descend farther into her skull. She is covered in black sores, said to be the result of toxic fumes inhalation. Her meager civil servant’s salary is not enough to pay for a necessary eye operation--it would be her fourth--nor for the numerous bottles of eyedrops and painkillers prescribed by doctors.

Partially blinded in the blast, single mother Esther Kithuku Kaswii lost her job as a waitress and now supports her family on the less than $2 a day she earns selling vegetables in her shantytown neighborhood. She still awaits treatment for groin pains--a result of being trampled by hordes of terrified survivors trying to flee the scene of the explosion.

Robbed of her confidence and self-esteem, Kaswii, 25, has one wish: “To feel like a human being again.”

Doctors predict an increase in the number of patients requiring trauma counseling in conjunction with this weekend’s commemoration of the blast.

Some victims planned to avoid scheduled vigils, parades and prayer meetings, fearful that the ceremonies would reopen painful wounds.

“I didn’t want to be around during the memorial,” said Philip Githuku Macharia, 19, who left Kenya last weekend for the U.S., where he hopes well-wishers will make good on their offers to help sponsor his college education. “I’ve had a lot of nightmares.”

His mother, Rose, a widow killed in the explosion, left behind three children, the others ages 16 and 9. The family’s grief was recently compounded by the death of their grandmother Gladys Mumbi Mwangi. She had vowed to take care of the Macharia children when her daughter died, but she was killed in July in a hit-and-run accident.

“I just want to move on,” Macharia said. “Once I get an education, I think things will be better.”