My initial weekly analysis for this week was going to be about the royal wedding, and I was significantly into its completion when a headline on TV caught my eye and made me stop typing, “Osama dead after a shootout”. I stared at the TV screen in disbelief for almost three minutes not hearing any word coming out of the reporter’s mouth. When I finally snapped out of the shock, the first thing I did was check my calendar for the day’s date to make sure it wasn’t April fools. And sure enough, it wasn’t.
On August 7, 1998, two bombs simultaneously went off in two major East African Cities, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. I remember that day very clearly. I was in my final years of primary school, and was on the verge of finishing my mid-year holidays. I was at home sleeping, when suddenly I got woken up by the sound of a large blast and the shaking of our apartment building. I was so shocked and terrified for I had never experienced anything like that before.
A few hours later, I came to learn that a terrorist attack had been made on the American Embassy which was less than a kilometer away from our apartment. At the age of 12, I really did not understand the term terrorist so I did not care much what it meant until I saw on TV the corpses of innocent civilians and wounded people that resulted from the bombing. It was a whole new experience to me, as our country has never had civil unrest. The sound of a bomb blast was new to my ears, and the sight of the outcome, horrifying to my eyes. And now ten years later, the man who masterminded those attacks, plus many other devastating terrorist acts like the September 11 attacks, is finally brought to justice. I couldn’t be happier.
