01/03/99 -- Copyright (C) 1999 The Washington Post [Article 330738, 105 lines]

            Bombing Dramatically Increased Kenya's Blind Population
                                 By Karl Vick
                        Washington Post Foreign Service

      On that chilly August morning, the sound of the first explosion outside
the U.S. Embassy brought workers in nearby buildings out of their seats and
over to the windows, curious. The second blast blew those windows into their
faces.
     "Our orthopedic colleagues said that usually when we get a mass trauma
like that you get a lot of limbs fractured," said Nairobi physician Marina
Gondi. "But this time it was the the eyes and face. All above-the-neck
injuries."
     What the Aug. 7 embassy bombing has meant to Kenya -- on top of the 213
deaths, the shattered extended families and what people here call an "off-key"
holiday season -- is an abrupt, dramatic increase in the number of people who
no longer have eyes. Of the 5,000 people injured by the blast, the "primary
severe injury was eyes, eyes, eyes," said Gondi. The Kenya Society for the
Blind, which before Aug. 7 saw its caseload increasing by one or two a month,
suddenly added 153 new clients.
     The figure includes scores of people whose vision was permanently
impaired by lacerating debris. One in six is like Catherine Achieno Biira, who
heard the roar, felt the rumble and looked up just as a wedge of plate glass
flew toward her eyes -- and ended up with no vision at all.
     "Help me Help me I cannot see" Biira cried from the floor beside her desk
in the Ufundi Cooperative Building, which overlooked the parking lot where the
truck bomb went off. Her clothes shredded by the flying glass, she was helped
down the stairs by a woman who held the rags over Biira's belly, swollen in
the seventh month of pregnancy. She remembers hearing shouts, broken glass and
the siren of the ambulance that carried her away to Nairobi Hospital.
     Biira, a clerk at Kenya's Teacher Service Commission office, lost one eye
instantly. What remained of the other was removed a day later by surgeons who
had worked frantically at hospitals all over Nairobi the previous day simply
stitching up lacerated corneas.
     That was all they could do at first. "Close the wound, so to speak," said
Gondi, an eye surgeon at Kenyatta National Hospital, Kenya's largest and
much-maligned public hospital. The resident staff lacked the expertise, and
the hospital the equipment, to even attempt repairs to the delicate inside of
the eye. For that work, experts from Germany and Egypt flew in. They operated
on 50 people. "A lot of vision was saved," Gondi said.
     But not all. Biira, for one, now had wounds instead of eyeballs. Still,
when her husband, Henry Lukhoba, heard the foreign experts had come, he went
from Nairobi Hospital, where Biira was being treated, to Kenyatta. There he
was approached by a gentle young man wearing extremely thick glasses. Anderson
Gitonga knows a little about eyes. He was on his way to being blind himself
until a cornea transplant restored a measure of his vision robbed by
progressive keratoconus. That surgery, combined with training in independent
living from a local institute, brought him to a job at the Kenya Society for
the Blind. Nine days after the bombing, Gitonga was at the dingy public
hospital looking for people who might benefit as he had. He came upon Lukhoba,
who thought there was still hope.
     "We went to Kenyatta to see if anything could be replaced, a cornea, an
iris," Lukhoba said. "You never know, maybe something has just come up. And
when these things come up, it is usually from these Western countries, not
from Kenya."
     Gitonga told him that if the eyeball was gone, so was any hope for sight.
The news hit Biira's husband hard. "It is really terrible when [someone] tells
you this is the position and nothing else can be done," he said. "All of a
sudden someone wakes up in the morning, goes to work, and that is the last day
that person sees. You really don't know who to be annoyed with."
     If there was a bright spot, it was the pregnancy. Biira, 24, had lost a
great deal of blood from her wounds. But her pregnancy survived the bombing
and the two months of hospitalization required to mend a deep wound in her
throat. When finally discharged she was home only a few days before returning
to private Nairobi Hospital to have the baby, on Oct. 26.
     It was as if two lives were delivered that day.
     "Before getting the child, I felt very useless and hopeless," Biira said.
"But now I have the hope. And the energy."
     She named the baby girl Jean Bahati. The first name honors the
gynecologist who helped her through the pregnancy's last two months.
     The second name is Swahili for "The Lucky One."
     "There were other expectant women, but during the day of the blast they
miscarried," Biira explained. "That is why I gave her the name."
     She learned to breast-feed, bathe and change her baby at the local
training institute that earlier had taught her the first rudiments of
independent living, beginning with how to walk unaided. She is working on
Braille: "I can now write my name." And she has found solace and strength in
sharing her experience with others blinded by the bomb.
     The training, moreover, has sharpened her ambition. But like much in
Kenya, it is likely to be stunted by inadequate resources.
     American rescue crews who worked in Nairobi immediately after the bombing
noted that its damage was worse than the same bomb would have caused in the
United States. In the wreckage of the collapsed Ufundi House office building,
they saw cement made with too much sand, and fewer steel reinforcement bars
than are standard in First World construction. And few new office buildings
would feature the suddenly lethal plate glass in the towers around the
embassy, where many of the shatter-proof windows remain in place today.
     A similar paucity of funds may threaten some efforts to recover from the
bomb.
     "What is making our work difficult is the issue of resources," said
Gitonga, of the Kenya Society for the Blind. "The whole process is quite
expensive in terms of equipment and personnel."
     Kenya has no eye banks, for example, and thus no repository for the
corneas that could be transplanted into a bombing victim whose hastily
stitched eye has healed into a scar that badly blurs sight. The Society for
the Blind recently received voice-recognition computers on which to train the
blind. But, once trained, Biira, for instance, has almost no chance of finding
a similar computer in a Kenyan workplace -- or of showing up at a job
interview with one of her own. Before the bombing, she lived with her husband,
a day laborer, in a slum.
     "There are lots of events going on in the world," said her husband.
"Another bomb will be someplace. So attention will shift from Nairobi [in]
August. And once people forget, whoever is helping will say, `I've done what I
can.' We don't know where to turn next.
     "Sustainable income is better than handouts. How long are you going to
get handouts?"

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