The shooting

Almost two years ago there was a shooting right outside my school. I blogged about it then but I was recently asked about it so I thought a trip down memory lane to a terrifying yet thrilling moment would be appropriate all this time later. It isn't the most normal thing to hear gunfire for so long right by you and even though I got over it fast, I realized later on that my sensitivity to loud bang sounds is a type of trauma caused by the fearful event and is now unwillingly in me.

It was 2013, sometime between March and the end of April if I remember correctly. The sun had gone down for the day and everyone was safe and sound in school (for those who don't know I went to a boarding school in Nairobi). Some were in the library studying, some were smoking in the smoking area, and others were off doing other things. I personally was sitting by the window of my friend Cornelia's room. Isabelle was in the chair next to me and Cornelia was sitting on her bed towards us. From what I can recall we were just talking casually about the night before like we normally would on a late Sunday afternoon. The window was open and we were laughing about something when suddenly we hear 6 loud bang noises outside the window right next to us. Our first reaction was to throw ourselves to the door that was on the other side of the room. We crumbled together as close to the door as possible and screamed. It didn't take long until we realized what the sounds were and our next reaction was to open the door and get out of the room when more shots were fired. Everyone else in our corridor ran out of their rooms in panic and automatically we all threw ourselves on the ground. The door to the balcony was open so we could see out. As the many guns kept firing over and over again, we saw how our guards ran away from the gate and hid behind one of our school buses. I remember so well how fast my heart was beating as me and the other girls were laying in fear beside one another. After a couple of minutes we see Antoine, our boarding parent, running out of the cafeteria screaming to everyone to stay down and far away from windows. It took about ten minutes when we realized that the shooting wasn't actually going on in school, but right on the other side of the fence which calmed us a little, but not nearly enough to let go of one another. The gunfire kept going on and on for at least thirty minutes and not until the very last minutes of the shooting had we learned to relax enough to get off the floor. Right at the end my very good friend Bea ran in to our corridor and told us that she has been trying to regain courage to run in here from her room where she had been alone. We all decided to sit down next to one another to feel safer until it had quiet down which it eventually did. A few minutes of silence told us that it was all over. Everyone called home to their parents afterward to tell the traumatic story. For about a week after that, the shooting was all everyone could talk about. There had been bullets that were shot into the mural by the smoking area which had led to panic for everyone that was sitting there. Others had been drinking tea on the balcony above the cafeteria and had been dragged in by Antoine seconds after the first six bullets. It wasn't until a few days later that we heard that there had been a fight between a group of thief's, and a full police car. Four people died and several bullets had hit the walls around the school. Of course rumours were spread all over Nairobi. Just a few weeks later I was at my friends house with a couple of his friends and they had heard that bullets had actually gotten in to the school and a bunch of people from the school had died. Thankfully that wasn't the case at all, everyone from my school remained safe and very much alive. All the scars that it left us with was a huge shock, and in my case a small fear of loud noises. 

I am so thankful and glad that the situation for us wasn't worse than it was and even though we might have thought at first that the shooting was actually going on at campus, which wasn't the case, we all live to tell about it. It was definitely an experience and just knowing how afraid I was then, I can't imagine how it must be for those who have actually been through a real shooting. Truly horrifying!

Right outside my school. The guards had been sitting in that little house when the shooting occurred

I was in the first corridor to the left and the smoking area is right between the building and the bushy fence

Click HERE for watch a video that Isabelle took at the very end of the shooting when we had all calmed down