MSUMARINI (Kenya): Pendo Masha’s expression tightens and her eyes fill with tears at the mention of her dead mother, a dancer torn apart in a suicide bombing as she welcomed Israeli tourists to Kenya.
Barefoot amid the palm trees of this coastal village, the eight-year-old child stiffens at the thought of the strangers who came and blew themselves up nine months ago, also killing at least 13 other people including her mother Kafedha.
Like most others in this huddle of huts, Pendo does not know why the bombing happened and has not heard of Osama bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda group claimed responsibility for the attack on the nearby Paradise Hotel.
What she does know is that her life of hardship became even tougher without the 600 shillings ($8) a week Kafedha earned performing the traditional welcoming dance of her Giriama community for tourists.
“Our life is worse now,” said Pendo’s uncle Mramba, a 58-year-old subsistence farmer who takes care of Pendo and Kafedha’s other children, Dama, 18, and Kitsau, six, in a mud and thatch house set in a red-earthed clearing amid maize fields.
“We do not understand what happened. They have harmed us,” he added slowly, pulling back a red baseball cap to wipe the sweat from his forehead with large, calloused hands.
DECISIVE BLOW: The combination of emotional and economic hurt inflicted on the families of Msumarini may be unusual, but their poverty is all too familiar in a tourist haven damaged more than once by Middle East-related extremist violence.
Industry officials estimate 15,000 tourism jobs have been lost in the coastal region since the November bombing, a disaster for perhaps 150,000 or more people dependent on those wages.
The attacks scared off tourists for months, hitting a sector still recovering from the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people, mostly Kenyans.
Hotel occupancy, normally about 40 to 45 per cent at this time of the year, has slumped to an average of about 20 to 30 per cent in the shoreline tourist hotels, hotel officials say.
Five men have been charged in connection with the attack on the Paradise Hotel, which occurred within minutes of a failed attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner leaving the coastal city’s airport. They have yet to enter pleas.
Police hopes of a decisive blow against extremist cells rose this month when they recovered five light anti-tank weapons and six AK47 rifles in a raid on the house of a man accused of links to Al Qaeda who killed himself in a grenade blast.
East Africa is seen by US investigators as a favourite area for foreign militants because of its porous borders, easy access to guns and relatively developed infrastructure.—Reuters
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