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Frank Githigia was bubbling with optimism when he woke up at dawn on Sept. 21 to meet clients at a posh coffee shop inside Westgate Shopping Mall located in an up market district in Nairobi.
The 38-year-old insurance sales agent was enticed by the ambience and elegance of the coffee shop located on the first floor hence his decided to wait for the clients there.
The father of two had no premonition of the tragedy that was lurking in shadows and enjoyed a lengthy banter with acquaintances as he sipped specialty coffee in anticipation of a financial windfall.
"As a salesman, every waking dawn come laden with promise or peril. It is a fact of life that we cannot escape and on Saturday, the skies were unusually bright and the occasional drizzles heralded good tidings," Githigia told Xinhua on Wednesday at a makeshift tent for counseling survivors of the terrorist attack at Westgate.
In a composed and friendly manner, Githigia gave Xinhua a blow by blow account of what transpired at the upscale Westgate mall when heavily armed assailants stormed into the premises.
"The first client I had secured an appointment with the previous day was punctual and we engaged for two hours at the coffee shop and later inked a deal that would ultimately change my life. To have someone buy life insurance without too much prompting is a game changer," said Githigia
He patiently waited for the second client to turn up and as noon approached, the coffee house and most of the food courts at the mall were swelling with humanity.
Githigia thought he had just woken up from a gory dream when gun shots and grenades thundered inside the coffee shop and adjacent boutiques.
"The attacks were swift and dramatic and thousands of shoppers created a stampede inside Westgate mall as they run for their dear lives. I witnessed firsthand an episode that resembled a blockbuster as the camouflaged attackers shot furiously in the air while people screamed," Githigia narrated to Xinhua
He revealed how sheer luck and fortitude worked in his favor as he sneaked through an emergency door to safety.
Githigia recounted how minutes after his dramatic escape from inferno at the mall, the world turned upside down as gun fire, grenade explosions, wailing and panic reigned supreme for the next two hours.
"In a short span, my phone was jamming with calls from relatives and friends who knew I had visited the mall in the morning. They wanted to know whether I was safe. I escaped from hell fire through a whisker and this experience will linger forever," a shaken Githigia told Xinhua as he lined up for post- trauma counseling.
Unlike other survivors who jammed the post trauma counseling center, Githigia escaped with no major injuries except bruises in lower abdomen and leg as he crawled his way to safety.
The terror survivors who spoke to Xinhua were clearly traumatized by the experience they underwent in the hands of vicious terrorists who spared nobody in their gory mission.
It took prodding for some of the survivors to open up and narrate their experience to a battery of local and foreign journalists camping at the makeshift tents where post trauma counseling was conducted. "I was having lunch with my younger sister and her two friends when hell broke loose inside Westgate shopping mall. What started as sporadic gun shots turned out to be a war theater as assailants engaged security forces and everyone lied on the floor to dodge the bullets," a young female survivor who requested anonymity told Xinhua.
She narrated how a multitude of shoppers run helter skelter to escape from gun fire as a cloud of smoke filled the aisles and staircases in the mall.
"The lucky few who escaped through the narrow emergency exits were lost for words in the ensuing mayhem. I sustained a minor fracture on my left hand due to pushing and shoving at the emergency door," she said.
"My sister and her friends were trapped inside the mall for two hours but were later rescued by security officers. When we reconnected, they narrated how they almost choked as smoke filled the entire mall," said the survivor
Her comrades at the Post traumatic counseling center were visibly shaken and only whispered in measured tones to narrate their ordeal inside a vipers nest.
No amount of words could erase the pain and agony that survivors and their immediate families bore on that dark noon on Saturday when gun men rained terror inside an up-scale shopping mall famous for its ambience and glamour.
