The time Gilbert Korir, 22, bid his family members goodbye six months ago, nobody believed that it would be the last time they were seeing him in public.
Korir, a KDF soldier, was on mission in Somalia when he fell in the trap of a lone gunman who invaded a military camp in lower Juba three weeks ago.
The suspected Al-Shabaab militant was shot dead by soldiers during the raid.
“Just a day before he was shot dead, Korir talked to me over the phone and asked me to supervise the planting of maize in a plot he purchased in the neighbourhood,” his mother, Nancy Mutai, told the press in an interview.
The distraught woman wiped her tears as she gives the accounts of events that befell her son who was the breadwinner of the family as his siblings were all dependent on him for assistance.
“It is a terrifying experience to lose your son in such miserable way. I never had the courage to go to Nairobi to view the body and take part in the autopsy. His sisters and brothers travelled to Nairobi,” Ms Mutai said.
Korir was enlisted into the military in 2020 and was sent to Somalia moments after pass-out.
Mrs Mutai said that she prays no parent experiences what she has gone through losing young son.
“It is sad he was killed before he getting married, have a family of his own and left children behind the way he had planned. I don’t have a grandkids to remember my son with” Mrs Mutai said.
His freshly dug grave with flowers withering on a heap of soil is the only proof in the compound that his body has been interred underneath with Mrs Mutai’s eyes seeing him in her dreams.
Content created and supplied by: allay (via Opera News )
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