Out from Kisumu

I brought to East Africa my travel backpack and a small duffel bag, with the intention of over the course of my travels I would give (almost) everything away. I’m going to try and document throughout the course of this—the things I drop off and to whom.

I left Kisumu on Friday morning to go to Nairobi. Early on in the month, Orliani, the guard at my second home, had asked me for my shoes. And I had told him I would think about it. As I left the house, I dropped off a little package at his chair, with my leather dress shoes (this was their second trip to Africa), a few pairs of socks, and a pair of pants. He thanked me a few times and said how he was travelling home at the beginning of the next month and would bring me back a Masai bracelet. I told him I would not be returning and he said, “If it’s God’s plan we will meet again.”

The bus ride to Nairobi was awful and broken into two parts. The bus I was on had only 4 passengers and we left right on time. But 30 minutes into our trip, I hear a long blast on the horn, the brakes are put on lightly, and then the brakes are slammed on hard and we skid to a stop. Before the bus stops, there’s an unmistakable knock against the front of the bus. We had hit something. (This is a real story, and the way things are in life out here, before you read ahead, make sure you want to know this.)

Your guess is as good as mine—child, bicycle, car, goat, dog, hand cart, motorcycle, cow, anything really.

The rule of the road is to not get out of the car when you hit someone—you drive straight to the nearest police station because people are sometimes killed for hitting a person with a car, and then a mob strikes when the driver or passenger get out to help. I stayed on the bus, and then I saw a crowd gathering around the bus. And then I heard someone say it was a little school girl. And I saw the crowd was not threatening the driver who had stopped, and gotten out of the bus. I figured, I should get out and see if there is anything I may be able to do.

So I climb down the stairs to the road and I’m expecting to see a mangled body of a girl under the wheels of the car. But instead I see a six year old girl walking down the road, crying, with blood staining the left side of her dress and a huge skull fracture with at least 3cm of asymmetric “lump” in the left temporal / parietal area.

It would seem fortuitous that this accident occurred just outside of a clinic / hospital so a kind woman grabs the girl and takes her to see the clinical officer who is way out of his league here. Meanwhile, the bus driver and the conductor are laying down branches to warn cars of the accident scene and calling the police as well as their manager and insurance.

Five minutes later, I’m talking with some people in the crowd and they say the girl is back, that the clinical officer is not trained nor equipped to deal with this situation. So the girl and this woman are just standing on the side of the road waiting to take a bus to get to town so she can potentially have her life saved.

I look at the driver and this was a friendly man and a caring man, and I say “Turn the bus around and take her to the regional hospital NOW.” He says, “I’ll be charged with a crime if I move the bus.” I yelled at him that the priority here isn’t your life, but her life and if she dies, he’ll have a whole lot more trouble. He just walked away at that moment.

So I sent someone to get the girl’s family, told the woman to sit in the shade with the girl and talk to her, and I stood in the road and stopped the first car that came by—a few cars went right on past despite seeing an accident scene and a bloodly little girl. Eventually a matatu came to stop—it was packed and couldn’t take her, but at least now I had faith someone would stop. The next vehicle was a pick-up, I waved it down (and stood in front of it) and it pulled off to the side. The woman with the girl, and a few of her colleagues, knew what to do—they jumped in, and braced her, and told them to the hospital as quickly as possible.

She was alert, speaking appropriately and had reactive pupils ten minutes after the accident but she had been hit hard by the bus. She was about 30 minutes out from the hospital and then who knows how long before she would be evaluated by someone competent. I can only hope for her.