Naliaka started her yesterday morning as she routinely does each school day. By 6:10 Am she was already up readying Whitney, her first-born, for school.
There was something odd yesterday though. Whitney, a seven-year-old Class One pupil, had thrown quite a tantrum.
She refused to have breakfast despite Naliaka’s multiple pleas.
As Whitney left for Precious Talent Top Primary School, Naliaka tended to her other child.
Whitney soon returned home from the school, which is just a few minutes’ walk from their home in Ng’ando, Dagoretti South. This was strange.
“She came back and asked me to give her money for snacks. I told her I didn’t have money and persuaded her to go back to school,” Naliaka recalled as she sat motionless on her bed, numbed by an overwhelming sadness and agony.
She eventually convinced Whitney to return to school, a difficult task, as the young girl was quite adamant.
After Whitney returned to school, and just as Naliaka was about to lie down for a morning nap, she heard noisy discussions by neighbours and when she went out to be updated, she found out that her daughter’s school building had collapsed.
She had rushed to the school with all intentions of rescuing a daughter she hoped was alive after hearing the initial reports of the incident, but dreadfully stumbled upon her lifeless body, glaring at her as it lay all alone amidst the debris.
The scene of the collapse was hugely upsetting and complicated to the eye —debris comprising rubble, broken wood, wire mesh, iron sheets, question papers in white, blue, green, yellow and an assortment of other colours; a child’s purple dust-layered crocs, a lone dusty white and pink sock, an unzipped school bag and distressed books with missing pages.
Naliaka says she immediately identified Whitney’s body the moment she bumped into it, and immediately wanted to carry it away.
“I fought to take her body and leave with it, but they restrained me and refused,” Naliaka emotionally narrated.
Soon after the rescue team restrained and assured her that she would get the body later.
Naliaka remembers painfully watching as Whitney’s body was covered up, before being taken to the mortuary.
The Standard caught up with her at their home, where neighbours had gone to condole with her.
Numbed by an overwhelming grief, a motionless Naliaka weakly curled up against a wall, atop one of two beds in her home, hazily watched as the TV presenter announced developments of the tragedy, with images alternating between the school and the Kenyatta National Hospital, where some of the injured survivors had been taken.
