Tuesday, 15th January 2019 was not a day on which we were following our regular routine. School had just reopened the day before, after Christmas break, and tragedy had struck the school community the same afternoon, when a teacher's husband collapsed, while watching his son play after school sports and passed away, despite huge efforts to resuscitate him. The teacher and her family lay heavily on my mind as I hurriedly packed my son's lunch and I remarked to my husband that, at that time, the previous morning, they must have all been having breakfast too, little knowing it would be their last meal together. And I had no inkling then, that the day which had started on a somber note, would end on a horrifying one...
It was not a regular day because my husband, our daughter and I were rushing around getting ready to visit 'Nyayo House', which houses the immigration department and where we trek faithfully every couple of years to get our passports stamped and to get new foreigner cards issued. I personally dread this trip every single time because we need to get through choc a bloc traffic and Nairobi's central business district is not one of my favourite places to visit here. I feel like the proverbial fish out of water there, cocooned as we usually are in our 'golden tower', (only elephants use ivory), from where everything we need is at a stone's throw and where we feel 'safe'.
After an hour's driving in heavy traffic, and narrowly missing being crushed by the public transport buses: the ubiquitous 'Matatus', which were going even faster and more recklessly than usual, given the morning rush hour, we reached our destination by 9:30 am. A couple of hours later, our passports had been stamped and we had been fingerprinted for the 5th time in more than seven years! There were huge sighs of relief all around, even as we wiped off the black ink from our hands! We had just validated our existence in Kenya, God willing, for the next couple of years.
We dropped off my husband to his office on our way home and began discussing our plans for the day. My daughter wanted to visit a couple of restaurants and I agreed, as she had just a few days of her break remaining and I had a rare week day off from teaching online, as students from three of the four schools scheduled for classes that day were in the middle of exams. But, one of the rules we live by is that we never gallivant around with our passports! If we were to, God forbid, lose our passports, between the four of us, we would have had to visit the High Commission Of India, Nairobi, for new passports (one visit would NEVER suffice, make that four trips!), Nyayo House for the Kenyan residence stamp (not AGAIN!), the Embassy of the United States Of American for our American visas which are on our current passports (that's next door to the house but the visas are EXPENSIVE) and last but not least, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates for my daughter's student visa, as she studies there (and college begins THIS Sunday!). It was simply not worth the risk. And so we asked my husband's driver to take us home first, and this decision prevented my daughter and me from being in a restaurant on the very road, Riverside Drive, where terrorists attacked a five star hotel just a couple of hours later....
Once the passports were under lock and key, we were about to head out, first for coffee at 'The Wasp and Sprout' (which my daughter has been wanting to visit for the last couple of years) and then for lunch at 'Le Grenier A Pain' (The Bread Attic) which is a couple of minutes from DusitD2 Hotel, where tragedy would unfold very soon....But our canine kid refused to let go of my daughter and so we decided to take her for coffee with us. By this time, it was very close to lunch time and we decided to combine lunch and coffee at Wasp and Sprout and not visit Riverside Drive at all, which also happens to be in our old neighbourhood of Westlands and subsequently my former neighbours told me that, like during the Westgate Attack, they could hear the explosions and the exchange of gun fire and see the smoke curling up, from our former building... Had we gone on to have lunch as planned, we would have been in the immediate vicinity and who knows when we would have managed to make it back home, since the road was shut down immediately and people were asked to evacuate every building around the hotel, on foot , as at that point they did not know if it was a single attack or a multi pronged one, like the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008...
Just the previous evening, (before we got the news of the death in our school community), we had broken a strict rule of 'not going out when there is school the next day' and taken our daughter and son bowling in a mall very close to our house. Since she is here for a very short time and we will not see her for the next five months, we were trying to cram everything possible in this short visit. In retrospect, we realized that we had visited almost every single place in the previous two weeks that are likely to be on a terrorist organization's radar... At the mall entry check point, the guard opened the boot of the car and gave a cursory glance inside, before waving us in...My son remarked that he had not even bothered to check properly... I jokingly told him that that was probably because we did not 'fit' the classic profile of terrorists, given that we had two 'children' (who are adult size) in tow. My son disagreed and this led to a discussion of children being used as suicide bombers by some organizations...Twenty hours later a suicide bomber blew himself up in DusitD2's Secret Garden restaurant, where my daughter has met friends and had lunch a few times, when she lived in Kenya...Terror is most terrifying when it hits close to home, until then, it just remains another statistic on the news....
And it was closer than we could have imagined. One of my daughter's closest school friends, an Ethiopian girl, who had moved to the United States five years ago, was back in Nairobi this month to meet all her old friends. She had been staying at the luxurious DusitD2 and had checked out to go back home just four days before the attack...What if she had been here last Tuesday? What if my daughter had been visiting her at the hotel that day?
These girls were not there but what about the people who were? Innocent people who were going about their own business or just trying to earn an honest living? They leave behind heart broken families and loved ones, many of whom are still trying to identify bodies, at the mortuary located, ironically, just down the road from Dusit. Our hearts go out to them. What about the members of the security forces, one of whom lost his life and many others who are grievously wounded? We salute them all for the stellar role they played in rescuing people and in securing the hotel in a comparatively short period of time.
When will we see a peaceful world? What are we doing to each other? Who knows when and how it will all end... All we can do is to have faith in God, live each day as constructively as we can, keep our phones handy and carry identification on our person at all times. (Many people messaged their location from inside the besieged hotel to family members, enabling police to search for and rescue them in record time. A few bodies did not have any identification on them, making the task so much harder than it already is...). These, then are the new 'rules' for living in an unruly and ruthless world.
DO VISIT KENYA. One swallow doth not a summer make.... Don't give up and don't give in. Together we stand!
It was not a regular day because my husband, our daughter and I were rushing around getting ready to visit 'Nyayo House', which houses the immigration department and where we trek faithfully every couple of years to get our passports stamped and to get new foreigner cards issued. I personally dread this trip every single time because we need to get through choc a bloc traffic and Nairobi's central business district is not one of my favourite places to visit here. I feel like the proverbial fish out of water there, cocooned as we usually are in our 'golden tower', (only elephants use ivory), from where everything we need is at a stone's throw and where we feel 'safe'.
After an hour's driving in heavy traffic, and narrowly missing being crushed by the public transport buses: the ubiquitous 'Matatus', which were going even faster and more recklessly than usual, given the morning rush hour, we reached our destination by 9:30 am. A couple of hours later, our passports had been stamped and we had been fingerprinted for the 5th time in more than seven years! There were huge sighs of relief all around, even as we wiped off the black ink from our hands! We had just validated our existence in Kenya, God willing, for the next couple of years.
We dropped off my husband to his office on our way home and began discussing our plans for the day. My daughter wanted to visit a couple of restaurants and I agreed, as she had just a few days of her break remaining and I had a rare week day off from teaching online, as students from three of the four schools scheduled for classes that day were in the middle of exams. But, one of the rules we live by is that we never gallivant around with our passports! If we were to, God forbid, lose our passports, between the four of us, we would have had to visit the High Commission Of India, Nairobi, for new passports (one visit would NEVER suffice, make that four trips!), Nyayo House for the Kenyan residence stamp (not AGAIN!), the Embassy of the United States Of American for our American visas which are on our current passports (that's next door to the house but the visas are EXPENSIVE) and last but not least, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates for my daughter's student visa, as she studies there (and college begins THIS Sunday!). It was simply not worth the risk. And so we asked my husband's driver to take us home first, and this decision prevented my daughter and me from being in a restaurant on the very road, Riverside Drive, where terrorists attacked a five star hotel just a couple of hours later....
Once the passports were under lock and key, we were about to head out, first for coffee at 'The Wasp and Sprout' (which my daughter has been wanting to visit for the last couple of years) and then for lunch at 'Le Grenier A Pain' (The Bread Attic) which is a couple of minutes from DusitD2 Hotel, where tragedy would unfold very soon....But our canine kid refused to let go of my daughter and so we decided to take her for coffee with us. By this time, it was very close to lunch time and we decided to combine lunch and coffee at Wasp and Sprout and not visit Riverside Drive at all, which also happens to be in our old neighbourhood of Westlands and subsequently my former neighbours told me that, like during the Westgate Attack, they could hear the explosions and the exchange of gun fire and see the smoke curling up, from our former building... Had we gone on to have lunch as planned, we would have been in the immediate vicinity and who knows when we would have managed to make it back home, since the road was shut down immediately and people were asked to evacuate every building around the hotel, on foot , as at that point they did not know if it was a single attack or a multi pronged one, like the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008...
Just the previous evening, (before we got the news of the death in our school community), we had broken a strict rule of 'not going out when there is school the next day' and taken our daughter and son bowling in a mall very close to our house. Since she is here for a very short time and we will not see her for the next five months, we were trying to cram everything possible in this short visit. In retrospect, we realized that we had visited almost every single place in the previous two weeks that are likely to be on a terrorist organization's radar... At the mall entry check point, the guard opened the boot of the car and gave a cursory glance inside, before waving us in...My son remarked that he had not even bothered to check properly... I jokingly told him that that was probably because we did not 'fit' the classic profile of terrorists, given that we had two 'children' (who are adult size) in tow. My son disagreed and this led to a discussion of children being used as suicide bombers by some organizations...Twenty hours later a suicide bomber blew himself up in DusitD2's Secret Garden restaurant, where my daughter has met friends and had lunch a few times, when she lived in Kenya...Terror is most terrifying when it hits close to home, until then, it just remains another statistic on the news....
And it was closer than we could have imagined. One of my daughter's closest school friends, an Ethiopian girl, who had moved to the United States five years ago, was back in Nairobi this month to meet all her old friends. She had been staying at the luxurious DusitD2 and had checked out to go back home just four days before the attack...What if she had been here last Tuesday? What if my daughter had been visiting her at the hotel that day?
These girls were not there but what about the people who were? Innocent people who were going about their own business or just trying to earn an honest living? They leave behind heart broken families and loved ones, many of whom are still trying to identify bodies, at the mortuary located, ironically, just down the road from Dusit. Our hearts go out to them. What about the members of the security forces, one of whom lost his life and many others who are grievously wounded? We salute them all for the stellar role they played in rescuing people and in securing the hotel in a comparatively short period of time.
When will we see a peaceful world? What are we doing to each other? Who knows when and how it will all end... All we can do is to have faith in God, live each day as constructively as we can, keep our phones handy and carry identification on our person at all times. (Many people messaged their location from inside the besieged hotel to family members, enabling police to search for and rescue them in record time. A few bodies did not have any identification on them, making the task so much harder than it already is...). These, then are the new 'rules' for living in an unruly and ruthless world.
DO VISIT KENYA. One swallow doth not a summer make.... Don't give up and don't give in. Together we stand!
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