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Huruma collapse left me childless, homeless and helpless

“When he realised that it wasn’t a thief and what was really happening he called me. It was someone moving their things out because the cracks in their fourth floor house were widening. I’d just turned the gas off when the ceiling caved in.”

Benjamin was rendered unconscious from the shock of watching the building come down on his family and was rushed to the Kenyatta National Hospital.

And it was only because of 4-year-old Maryanne that Antonia remained conscious.

“She kept calling out to me. Telling me to call her father and tell him where we were trapped. I felt so tired but she started singing Sitolia and that gave me the strength to feel around for the parts of my phone that had fallen apart. I could hardly move and my legs were in such pain.”

Her phone keeping her in contact with her rescuers, they were eventually pulled out nine hours later.

“I didn’t know if my baby was alive or dead. In all that time I only heard her cry out once but I couldn’t reach her.”

She laid her baby to rest on Thursday, January 8.

“You know we were planning to move,” she says. “When we came home from the hospital we had a difficult time trying to get the door open. I think it was an omen.

It’d always been difficult to open so the caretaker had dug up the bottom. But it had never been that hard. Pastor who was with us told us to move because it didn’t bode well. That same afternoon my husband went out and identified a place.”

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It’s in this Pastor’s house, Daniel Katula, that she now sits.

“They have nowhere to go,” he says. “I know money can’t bring back the dead. But something to acknowledge their loss and to get them resituated would have been nice.”

Nairobi Senator Mike Sonko made a personal contribution of Sh1 million to the victims of the collapse but Antonia says she hasn’t received a single cent.

“We were told that someone impersonated us and claimed the money.”

And so she sits not only childless, but remains homeless.

The death of her child and four others in the collapse spurred both the national and county government to action given the collapse of another residential building in Makongeni only 17 days earlier.

READ: How I made it out of the Makongeni death trap alive

President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered a building audit while Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero took measures against those in his employ and responsible for ensuring building safety.

And while they may prevent the suffering of another in future, for Antonia, Angel and Benjamin, there is no turning the clock back.

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