Stranded in Kenya and abandoned by my country. Again.

Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (IATA: NBO, ICAO: HKJK) is an international airport in Nairobi, the capital of and largest city in Kenya. Located in the Embakasi suburb 15 kilometers (9 mi) southeast of Nairobi’s central business district, the airport has scheduled flights to destinations in over 50 countries.The airport is named after Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president and prime minister. The airport served over 7 million passengers in 2016.

Stranded in Kenya and abandoned by my country. Again

Ten years after my Marine husband’s death, I felt the familiar frustration of facing a government slow to protect one of its own

Soldiers stood at the entrance to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi brandishing automatic weapons and bottles of hand sanitizer. My boyfriend and I were on our way home to the United States — or so we thought.

We had been on a safari I booked almost a year ago, enticed by an ad for a cheap flight. My family never had money for vacations when I was growing up, but as an animal-obsessed kid, I fantasized about seeing the most beautiful ones in the world. Elephants! Hippos! Zebras! Lions! This was my dream trip. And Kenya seemed like the perfect destination for commemorating the 10th anniversary of my husband’s death. Years before we married, when we were friends in junior high, I told Cleve about my dream, and we both laughed — Africa might as well have been another planet to two teenagers from rural Alabama.

The Kenyan air was welcoming after a long, rainy winter in Oregon, where I now live. It reminded me of summers growing up in the South. And the trip was everything I imagined it would be until my boyfriend Brent and I tried to get back to Oregon as the coronavirus charted its deadly course around the world.READ MORE

Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/

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