Sight of two children killed in deadly road accident broke many hearts
You may never understand the pain of covering a tragic road accident until you arrive at the scene and are met by bodies of children lying in the cold morning dew.
When I arrived at the scene of one of the deadliest and most horrific road accidents that I have covered this year, at Migaa, on the Nakuru-Eldoret highway, my first attraction was the bodies of two children next to the wreckage.
They were wrapped in a chequered red leso, as if to protect them from the biting cold, next to the scene littered with fresh blood, personal effects and foodstuffs.
I kept asking myself, are they alive or dead? Are they siblings? Are the parents alive or among the dead? Sadly, nobody I asked seemed to be bothered with that.
The Red Cross and St John Ambulance personnel and police officers were busy pulling the bodies out of the wreckage of the bus and packing them in white gunny bags. I found the 19th body being loaded into a vehicle to be transported to Nakuru County Mortuary.
SAD AND TRAGIC
My eyes kept darting behind the bodies of the two children. Out of curiosity, I moved closer. They were roughly two and nine years old.
But just before I could confirm my worst fears, a Red Cross official emerged. He bent forward, jotted something in a plain paper and moved on. I thought all was well. Moments later, his female colleague appeared and loaded the bodies in an ambulance.
What followed was one of my most heartrending instances in my two-decade journalism career with Nation Media Group. Are they alive, I asked? “I am sorry, these children died a long time ago,” replied the Red Cross official.
Apparently, the children’s bodies could not be mixed with those of adults as there were no body bags that they could fit in.
I immediately lost count and could no longer confirm the toll from St John Ambulance official Caroline Cherotich, who was updating me with the statistics.
But I was not alone; the moment it was revealed that the children were dead, onlookers wailed in unison. Just like me, they had hoped the two children were alive. What a sad and tragic end of the year!