It started like any other Wednesday. The familiar, chaotic rhythm of Nairobi life was the soundtrack to my morning errands. But then, the rhythm broke. Up ahead, I saw a cluster of people, their bodies forming a tight circle of morbid curiosity. Their voices were a mix of hushed, conspiratorial murmurs and sharp, ugly laughs. This wasn’t a celebration. This was a spectacle.
Drawn closer by a sense of unease, I saw the reason for the gathering. A young woman, who I later learned was named Ivet, was unconscious on the ground. She was barely out of her teens, a crumpled figure oblivious to the drama unfolding around her. One lone man was trying to resuscitate her, his focused efforts a silent, desperate rebuke to the inaction of the twenty or so onlookers.
He was an island of empathy in a sea of indifference.
A Wall of Judgement, Built on Lies
“Nini imefanyika? (What happened?)” I asked the nearest person.
The answers came back, not with concern, but with cold, confident judgment. Each person had a version, a story they had crafted to make sense of the scene in the most uncharitable way possible.
“She’s just acting,” one woman scoffed, folding her arms. “Anatafuta attention tu.”
“I heard she was caught stealing from that shop over there,” another man added, pointing vaguely. The rumour, baseless but juicy, spread through the small crowd like a contagion. They latched onto it, embellished it. It was easier to believe she was a criminal than to believe she was a person in crisis.
Most of the onlookers, in a twist of painful irony, were women. Instead of a maternal or sisterly instinct to protect, they became the architects of her shame. They whispered vulgar theories about her, their words painting her as promiscuous, deceitful, and deserving of her fate.
I was appalled. Here was a human being, collapsed and vulnerable on the hard, dusty ground, and the immediate community response was not to help, but to convict her in a makeshift court of public opinion. A local dispensary was less than 300 metres away—a five-minute walk that felt, to this crowd, like an impossible journey. They were frozen by a chilling mix of apathy, fear, and a bizarre sense of entertainment.
The one man trying to help looked up at me, his face a mask of frustration and concern. “I don’t think she’s faking it,” he said, his voice low but firm. He was right. Her stillness was too absolute, her vulnerability too real.
“We have to get her to a doctor,” I said, the words feeling heavy and obvious.
He met my eyes. “Help me,” he replied. “We can go together.”
I’ll be honest with you—for a brief second, I hesitated. We live in a city where caution is a survival tool. Is it a scam? Will I get entangled in a domestic issue? Will I become a target myself? These fears are real. But then I looked at Ivet, a daughter, a sister, lying there. And I looked at the crowd, their faces a mixture of contempt and curiosity. The risk of getting involved was nothing compared to the shame of walking away.
The choice was clear. Inaction was a verdict in itself.
The Unravelling of a Life
Together, this kind stranger whose name I still don’t know and I managed to get Ivet to the nearby clinic. The sterile silence of the examination room was a universe away from the venomous noise of the street.
As the clinical officer attended to her, Ivet slowly regained consciousness. And then, the true story began to unravel, piece by heartbreaking piece. It was far darker and more painful than any of us could have imagined.
The first domino was hunger. The doctor asked a simple, standard question: “When did you last have a proper meal?”
Ivet’s voice was a fragile whisper. “Sunday.”
It was Wednesday. For over three days, she had been running on empty. My mind immediately flashed back to a difficult period in my own past. I knew that feeling—the dizziness, the disorientation, the way your brain can simply shut down from prolonged hunger and stress. The crowd saw an actress; the reality was a body that had finally surrendered to deprivation.
But that was only the beginning. We needed to contact her family. She gave us two numbers for her brothers. The first call was to a brother who was too far away to be of immediate help. Understandable. The second call shattered what little faith I had left in human decency that day.
We dialled the number of her other brother, who lived right here in Nairobi. I explained the situation: your sister has collapsed, she’s in a clinic, she needs you.
His response was a blade. “Mimi niko busy,” he said. I am busy.
No questions. No concern. Just a dismissal. I asked Ivet if she had wronged them, if there was a family feud I was unaware of. “No,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “That’s just how they are. They don’t care.”
Her own family, her own blood, was cut from the same cloth as the strangers in the crowd. They saw her suffering not as a crisis to be solved, but as an inconvenience to be avoided.
As she found a little more strength, the rest of the story tumbled out. Her job, on the bustling Ronald Ngala Street, had ended two months ago. With her income gone, she had fallen behind on rent. Her landlord, after two months of non-payment for her KES 3,500-a-month room, had thrown her and her belongings onto the street that very morning.
And then came the final, brutal blow. The reason she was so weak, so disoriented, when she collapsed. That morning, before the eviction, her boyfriend, Tediyas, had beaten her.
I didn’t ask for details. I didn’t want to force her to relive the trauma. Her body was too weak, her spirit too broken, to defend herself or recount the horror. It was enough to know that the person who should have been her protector was her tormentor.
In the span of a few hours, she had been abused, made homeless, and had collapsed from hunger, only to be judged as a thief by her neighbours and abandoned by her family. Her emergency didn’t start when she hit the ground. Her emergency had been a slow, silent, cascading failure of every support system a person should have.
The Lessons from a Wednesday Afternoon
That day left me with a profound sense of satisfaction for having helped, but also a deep-seated sadness for the world Ivet inhabits. It forced me to think about our role as individuals in a society that is forgetting how to care.
Lesson 1: Choose Compassion Over Conclusion
The crowd’s instinct was to label Ivet to create distance. By calling her “thief” or “actress,” they absolved themselves of responsibility. It’s a defence mechanism: if she is a bad person who made bad choices, then what happened to her can’t happen to me, a good person who makes good choices. But life is rarely that simple. Everyone you meet is carrying an invisible backpack of struggles. Ivet’s contained joblessness, homelessness, abuse, and hunger. What are the people around you carrying? Let’s stop writing people’s stories for them and instead, offer them a blank page and a pen by asking, “Are you okay? How can I help?”
Lesson 2: Defy the Bystander Effect with Initiative
There’s a psychological phenomenon called the “bystander effect”: in an emergency, the more people are present, the less likely it is that any one person will help. Everyone assumes someone else will intervene. That crowd was a textbook example. They were all waiting for a hero, not realizing that heroism is simply the decision to take initiative. The man who helped first and I were not doctors. We didn’t have the solution. But we knew the first step was to get Ivet to someone who did. You don’t have to solve the whole problem. Just solve the next problem. Get them off the road. Call the ambulance. Shield them from prying eyes. Your small initiative can break the paralysis of the crowd.
Lesson 3: Community is a Verb, Not a Noun
That day, Ivet was failed by two communities. She was failed by her neighbourhood community, which chose judgment over aid. And she was failed by her family community, which chose indifference over duty. This is a stark reminder that community is not a passive thing. It’s not just about living in the same area or sharing the same bloodline. Community is an action. It is the conscious, daily choice to show up for one another. The only community that worked for Ivet that day was the one created in an instant by two strangers who decided to act. We must actively build our communities through empathy, support, and shared responsibility.
Lesson 4: Learn to See the Quiet Emergencies
Ivet’s collapse was loud and public, but it was the result of a long, quiet emergency. It was the slow burn of job loss, the creeping dread of rent arrears, the silent terror of domestic abuse, and the gnawing pain of hunger. By the time a crisis becomes visible, the damage has already been done. We must become more attuned to the quiet emergencies around us. Is a colleague suddenly withdrawn? Is a neighbour selling their furniture? Does a friend seem to be losing weight rapidly? We must create a culture where people feel safe enough to admit they are struggling before they hit the ground.
Your Challenge: Be the One Who Makes a Difference
My personal philosophy has been solidified by this experience: Every day, perform one random act of kindness for someone, especially a stranger. Do good and disappear.
I hope what happened to Ivet doesn’t happen to anyone else, but hope is not a strategy. Action is. So I challenge you, the person reading this, to be the one who steps in. Don’t wait for a dramatic scene. Kindness is most needed in the small, overlooked moments.
- When you are buying lunch, buy an extra plate for the street kid you see every day.
- If you see someone’s car stalled, don’t just drive past. Stop and ask if they have someone on the way.
- Pay the KES 50 matatu fare for the mother struggling to find her coins while holding a child.
- Check in on that friend who has gone silent on WhatsApp. A simple “Thinking of you, hope you’re okay” can be a lifeline.
- Support local businesses and be kind to the staff. Remember Ivet lost her job on Ronald Ngala Street—that single event started her downward spiral.
In a world that can feel increasingly isolating, your single act of kindness can be the one thing that restores someone’s faith in humanity. It can be the difference between collapsing in shame and finding the strength to get back up. Let’s be the people who don’t just spectate. Let’s be the ones who build a better community, one compassionate act at a time.
