Articles

A Final Journey Home Saved From Darkness, Survivor May Be Last

Neely Tucker, Free Press Foreign Correspondent - August 11, 1998 Tuesday

The explosion at the U.S. Embassy that killed nearly 200 people picked up Samuel Nganga, lifted him into the air and shot him down a hallway into what should have been a grave of collapsed steel and concrete.

Instead, the 45-year-old scrap metal dealer landed under a support beam in a stairwell. The beam held up tons of rubble, cradling him in a five-foot-wide cocoon within the Ufundi Cooperative Building, a six-story office building destroyed by the blast Friday.

In this space, dark as a coffin and almost as narrow, he lived for 36 hours. Just before midnight Saturday, Israeli and Red Cross rescue teams pulled him out.

"I thought about death; I thought about another bomb going off; I thought about all these stones falling down on me," Nganga said in his hospital room Monday, speaking about his ordeal for the first time. "It was all dark, no light. An hour seemed longer than a day."

As rescue workers plowed through tons of twisted concrete Monday, hoping to find another trapped victim alive, dozens of Kenyan families waited for news of more than 50 people still missing. They prayed for a happy ending like Nganga's, but that is not likely.

Israeli Brig. Gen. Ilan Arrari, commander of the rescue effort, said Monday that hopes were very slim that a trapped woman known only as Rose would be found alive.

She is in an elevator shaft, Arrari said, but hasn't communicated with rescuers for 24 hours. Arrari said there was no chance any other victim could be alive.

Dozens of families make a sad pilgrimage every day, from hospital to hospital, hoping to find loved ones among the estimated 5,000 wounded. Finally, they end up on the grounds of the city morgue.

Bombing victims have overrun refrigeration units, so 40 bodies lie sprawled on metal tables in the open air. There is no room for more. When rescue workers pull another corpse from the wreckage, they lay the body on the floor.

None of the corpses are covered so that the streams of relatives can try to identify them. Their arms and legs hang off tables. Many are burned or mutilated beyond recognition.

"We're headed for a nationwide case of post-traumatic stress disorder," said Frank Njangu, a psychiatrist at Nairobi Hospital, referring to a delayed stress syndrome that affects trauma victims weeks or even years after the incident has passed. "We Kenyans have no experience with this physical sort of tragedy, but neither do we have counseling facilities for the massive scale of grieving and loss that is coming upon us."

For the moment, this drama of grief is played out in hospital waiting rooms or at the morgue. Families tend to their loved ones, hope for the impossible or reconcile themselves to the inevitable.

"My daughter comes to me every night in my dreams, dear brother, and she is crying for help," said the Rev. John Mungai, minister at Nairobi's Apostolic Faith Church. "I see her trapped under the rubble, crying for help, but no one can assist her. I can hear her but not find her, cannot get to her."

Mungai's daughter is named Margaret -- he always uses the present tense -- and she is 20 years old. She is slim and pretty. She is a student at the secretarial college, which was housed on the upper floors of the destroyed Ufundi building, he said.

Margaret was in school at the time of the blast. She has not been heard from.

So her father waits for her to come home one last time, even if home is the city morgue. He ignores the stench and the flies.

"We pray and have hope for her, of course," Mungai said. "But I only wish that she will be found now, so we can give her our final love and good-byes."