Victoria on surviving a school fire and speaking through art
“Through all the smoke, I thought it was a joke until I saw the flames”
Some stories sit with you for a while, Victoria’s is one of them.
She was just in form 2 when her high school dormitory caught fire in 2017. What began with disbelief quickly turned into horror. She described students jumping from windows, others frozen in fear and a chaotic evacuation without drills, without alarms and without fire extinguishers. She painfully described how other students lost their lives because there was no fire exit and how the only door present could not bulge open because it was a heavy metal door. Also help came too late, the Nairobi City County Fire Department.
Our conversation was heavy. Recalling the disaster was quite painful for Victoria, I could tell, but she carried it with grace. “We didn’t know where to go. There were no signs. No plan”, she recalled. She said that the only immediate help they got was from the school support staff and teachers, which only helped a little bit.
The period of healing took time. Kenya Red Cross helped the students work through the trauma. Through our conversation, she discovered a passion for turning pain into purpose. She is an upcoming artist and together we imagined creating a pictorial representation of her story that could warn, teach and inspire. She also advocated for the power of art especially in educating people on disasters and its response.
Victoria believes every school needs a dedicated emergency unit, not just first aid kits and drills but a culture of preparedness. “We cannot lose more students to carelessness”, she told me. Her voice joins the chorus in this project ‘Emergency Urbanism’. Youth speaking from the edge of crisis but not consumed by it, youth demanding better. Youth and the entire community who survived and are now demanding cities that are safe and will protect the next generation.
