vendredi 11 mai 2007

Kenya: NGO Boss Tells of Son's Wish Before the Flight

The Nation (Nairobi)
6 May 2007
Joseph Ngunjiri
Nairobi

Before going back to Paris where he was set to be registered as an advocate, 27-year-old Ouandji Pierre had one request to his father in Nairobi - to visit relatives in Douala, Cameroon. It turned out that this was the last time he was seeing them.

Pierre was among passengers on the Kenya Airways flight KQ 507 which crashed near the small Cameroonian town of Niete.
Africa 2007

He is the first son of Louis Roger Ouandji, the secretary-general of NGO Shelter Afrique, who is based in Nairobi.

A shocked Mr Ouandji told the Sunday Nation yesterday that his son, who had last visited them three years ago, wanted to see his grandmother to whom he was very close.

"My mother called him 'my husband,"' he said. "He had requested also to see as many relatives as possible. He must have had a premonition that this was the last time he was seeing them."

Pierre had just finished his post-graduate studies in law at Montpellier University in Paris. He had his secondary school education at Dennis Diderot French School in Nairobi.

The father said that Pierre was supposed to have left for Douala on Monday, but the plane had been overbooked, so he settled for the Tuesday flight.

Had he stuck to the original travel plan, he would have been back yesterday.

Seeing that he had wasted a day due to the missed flight, his father asked him to stay one more day so as to make up and spend more time with the relatives.

As it now turns out, it made all the difference. The young man would have arrived yesterday morning and left for Paris today. The father had even planned a farewell party for him at the Safari Park Hotel today. But this was not to be.

"I was at the airport to pick him up at 6.30 am where, for close to one hour, officials kept telling us to wait for information on the flight," he recalled. By this time they had started suspecting that something was wrong.

"By the time they called us aside for information on the ill-fated flight, we could tell by their body language that they were about to relay some really bad information."

The man recalled that before his son left for Cameroon, he sat him down for a man-to-man talk.

"I had told him that as my first son, he would take over should anything happen to me," he said. "I also assured him that I was very proud of him, and he replied that he understood."

Pierre was the first son in a family of six children.

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