COVER STORY
COVER STORY
IN MEMORIAM OF DR EUNICE SONGA- SARACENO , BA , MD
By Dr . Luca Saraceno , MSc , PhD
At approximately 4:30 pm of Friday the 27th of January 2017 , my wife , my best friend , the love of my life , Dr Eunice Songa-Saraceno , died like a hero . Aged 34 , she died young and beautiful , like the heroes of the ancient myths ; willing to change her Country she died fighting inequality and injustice , like only true heroes do .
This is what I will tell to our beautiful daughter about her mum , when she will be old enough to understand what a true hero is . At her early age of one year and ten months , she can now only ask every day where mummy is and hug me back when I hold her tight , trying to hide my tears .
Eunice loved Kenya , and made me quickly love it ; with its inner and outer beauty : the beauty of its landscape and the kindness and hospitality of its people . As a foreigner I immediately felt welcome and loved in Kenya , being always loved by Eunice , by her family , by her friends and very often by many of her fellow Kenyans , who embraced me like a brother . We lived a good life , every day we reminded ourselves we were lucky and happy ; she considered herself privileged for what she had , she considered herself privileged for being happy to live here and now . She knew , understood and fought the absurdity of the tribalism and nepotism that still so often drive the power dynamics of her Country when she spent time away from me , her friends and her family and for over three months , as part of the program Uongozi Kenya , demonstrated with her exceptional leadership skills what a good leader should do , which should be his / her quality , how these should not be measured on the basis of his / her surname or place of birth .
She fought day and night for her fellow Kenyans , for the common citizens who did not have the chance , the money , the luck to go to a major private hospital , or to fly to India or the UK . There , in the poor , under resourced conditions of Kenyatta National Hospital - the biggest referral Hospital in East Africa , in the heart of Nairobi – she had to run across hospital wards looking for spares to try to find a solution to the injustice of patients who could not receive treatments because machines were unavailable , or broken .
She fought for the basic right of patients to receive care as soon as possible and not days and weeks after their admission when their conditions would have deteriorated ; she despaired for the unforgiving absence of basic citywide and nationwide ambulance services : in the few cases in which vehicles were available they had no fuel , material , trained paramedics and this meant that regularly patients arrived to her in the backseat or boots of cars , when it was simply too late to do anything to save them . She eventually realized that there is a common denominator that allow the ugly and wrong to thrive and grow in Kenya . That there is one main reason why the “ system ” remains broken , why services remain absent , why young mothers keep dying in public hospitals way more than in private hospitals , why so many young children continue to miss basic opportunities , even why roads will always have potholes .
She realized that that there is a reason why things are not changing , why systems are not improving , despite people getting richer all across the country , despite the economy thriving , despite the tourists coming back en masse . And she realized that the reason is the apathy of the Kenyan middle-upper class when put in front of the funds mismanagement , corruption , misappropriation of resources that should finance public services , the guilty apathy of the Kenyan middle-upper class to hold Government Officials , Institutions , Authorities ( regardless of tribe and politics ) accountable .
I invite everybody to read her entire article carried by the Marketing Africa Magazine crew here-in as the lead story . It is definitely worth the few minutes it will take to read and hopefully the time you will take to digest and ponder over what she penned . The words of that article , which she titled “ the new Mau Mau
50 MAL 16 / 17 ISSUE