One of the Prado’s tyres bursts. The vehicle veers off the rough road at Chabi Baar in Mandera and rolls a number of times, finally landing in a ditch. The driver is hurled out as a result. He lies on the ground, unconscious and bleeding.
It takes about an hour for the next vehicle using that road to reach the scene. It is a lorry. Luckily for this driver and two people he was with in the Prado, the lorry stops.
Before long, this driver, who is sprawled on the ground, bleeding heavily on the head, is in the lorry being ferried to the nearest health facility.
That injured man is Harun Maalim Hassan, and this is in March 2007.
Today, he is paralysed from the waist down. Whenever he thinks about that day, questions linger in his mind.
One of them is: What if he had his seatbelt on? The two passengers he was driving in the vehicle had urged him to buckle up but Mr Hassan, then a 28-year-old District Officer, had no time for the strap.
“My friends told me to wear the safety belt. But because it was very hot and that thing was a little bit rough on the skin, I told them no,” he tells Lifestyle .
“I remember my friend telling me twice to wear a safety belt. That is the only last conversation that I always remember.”
Also, he often wonders: What if he was driving at a slower speed? He admits that the road wasn’t in the best of shapes but, as Somali music blared off the car’s cassette player, he remembers driving at between 50 and 60 kilometres per hour.
“Clearly, this was a high speed considering the bad condition of the road,” he confesses in his book Behind the Wheels: Changing the Disability Narrative, which will soon be distributed to schools across Kenya.
There is another question that sometimes consumes his thoughts, too. He is ever grateful to the people in the lorry who carried his unconscious self to a health centre, but he often wonders: What if they did not place him in a sitting position? What if they had been taught about how to handle an accident victim?
He sometimes thinks that maybe, just maybe, if his rescuers knew a thing or two about containing serious injuries after a crash, he might not have hurt his spine so much as to suffer paralysis.
“When accidents happen, people quickly rush to the scene and want to save the affected. But in the process, they don’t know that they are damaging the victim, making them much worse,” he says.
In his book, he delves more into the topic: “My two friends [in the car] and the Good Samaritans who came to my aid knew nothing about the DRSABCD procedure. Unfortunately for me, the training by such charitable organisations as the Kenya Red Cross Society, which sensitises the public to lay accident victims on a stretcher, had not reached the people who came to help me.”
DRSABCD stands for (D)anger, (R)esponse, (S)ending for help, minding the patient’s (A)irway and (B)reathing, conducting (C)ardiopulmonary resuscitation and possibly administering a (D)efibrillator.
“By forcing my comatose body into a sitting position, my helpers may inadvertently have exacerbated what may well have been treatable injuries,” he writes in Behind the Wheels .
Mr Hassan show the book he has written, titled Behind the Wheels: Changing the Disability Narrative .
Photo credit: Jeff Angote | Nation Media Group
“But they knew nothing about the recovery position (how a patient is placed in a lying position to aid breathing and prevent further injury) and the first aid method of DRSABCD, or the fact that the visible injuries on my head were really the tip of the iceberg. I really thank them for taking their valuable time to help me. Through their help, God probably saved me to share the lessons I have learnt from my injuries,” he adds.
In his interview with Lifestyle , he wants this matter of handling accident victims to be amplified more.
“That kind of information is really very important: Are our drivers trained? Are passengers or the general public being trained? Is it adequately captured in the curriculum or our schools: primary, some basics; at secondary level, some advanced knowledge; and maybe even in universities as a common course unit, the way they do with communication skills and such?” He poses.
He goes on: “So, if road safety issues were captured like that, then many damages that have happened now, and which continue to happen, would not have happened. As I was admitted at the spinal injury hospital [in Nairobi], 99 per cent of the patients there are victims of road accidents. And interestingly, this is a youthful population; an active population.”
“Instead of tying me, they made me sit on the lorry. That might have damaged the whole thing. But if this campaign and education would have reached them, they would have maybe immobilised me, tied me on a stretcher, or maybe something similar — even pieces of wood,” he adds.
We are having the interview on a Wednesday afternoon at his office in Westlands. For the past one year, he has been the CEO of the National Council for Persons with Disabilities — a state agency that executes the government’s programmes for the disabled.
“Before it happened to me, I paid no heed to the plight of persons with disabilities. Then a car crash left me a paraplegic. Today, I take it upon myself to add my voice.
How this man who had a life-changing incident aged 28 in 2007 — the same year he had expressed interest in becoming the Mandera West MP but could not convince local elders to endorse him — is a story worth a book and, incidentally, Behind the Wheels captures that.
On January 17, a day after our interview, Mr Hassan signed a contract with Kenya Literature Bureau, the publishers of the book, on the royalties sharing formula after the yet-to-be-launched new edition book is taken to schools.
“I was going through that document and there are things I didn’t understand,” he had joked. “Unaelewa tu moja muhimu ya 50 per cent. Hatujaelewa hiyo ingine.” (You just understand the important bit on 50 per cent. You don’t understand the rest).
Mr Hassan’s is a story of a dreamer. He was born in Mandera to a polygamous family of more than 30 children. As a pupil at Mandera DEB Primary School, he remembers moments they would go to River Daua to swim after classes.
“Sometimes we would cross the river to Ethiopia. On our way, we would pick tomatoes and mangoes from nearby farms to satiate our hunger,” he writes in his book.
For secondary school, he went to Mandera Secondary School before joining Kenyatta University for a degree in environmental studies.
He graduated in 2004 then worked briefly with the National Museums of Kenya. He later left for Somalia to work with a non-governmental organisation.
“I was also offered a job as a district environment officer at the National Environment Management Authority. I, however, declined this offer as I pursued other engagements in civil service. In 2006, I took up a position in the provincial administration as a District Officer,” he writes.
But he was dreaming of more. He thought he could take a stab at the 2007 General Election by running for MP. So serious was he in his resolve that he went out on a campaign to popularise himself among the elders. He was one of the eight candidates the elders of his Darawa sub-clan had to choose from.
“I was the youngest. I had never occupied a high office before and, of course, I had the least amount of money. As it turned out, I would not be the lucky candidate,” he writes.
At the interview, he said he may never return to politics again: “Getting into the active politics space is now not in me.”
The lorry took him to a health centre where he didn’t stay for long before a pick-up was hired to take him to the Mandera Referral Hospital. He would later be flown to Nairobi. There was no room at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) and he was wheeled to the Nairobi Hospital where he stayed for three months.
It is at the Nairobi Hospital that he came to his senses on his third week of admission. At first, he thought he was at a hospital in Mandera.
He remembers waking up to the sight of his younger brother, Said, and asking him what was going on.
“He told me I had sustained major head and spinal injuries in a car crash. He had no idea about the extent of the spinal injuries or their implications for my life,” writes Mr Hassan.
“Moments later, the neurosurgeon attending to me as my lead doctor walked over to my bed,” he adds.
“While smiling, he said my case was a miracle. Considering the extent of my injuries, I should have been dead. He said I had a blood clot in my head.”
It was at Nairobi Hospital that the news was broken to Mr Hassan that he would never walk again, and it left him shell-shocked. Stress and wishing for death would soon set in.
From Nairobi Hospital, he went to KNH for three weeks before he was admitted to the National Spinal Injury Hospital, where he stayed for eight months for physiotherapy and rehabilitation.
In February 2008, he left the spinal injury hospital for his home in Mandera. There, he would spend many months coming to terms with his new condition, reading and being visited by friends.
He would later quit his job as a District Officer as he focused on creating the Northern Nomadic Disabled Organisation (Nondo) to champion the rights of disabled people in northern Kenya.
“I lost interest (in the DO’s job), you know. I just can’t imagine how I can be a DO, a senior DO in a uniform wearing a cap and that swagger stick. It didn’t make sense to me,” he says.
He would later go back to university for a master’s degree where his thesis was on public administration and service delivery for persons with disabilities in rural Garissa County.
“I found myself now becoming more or less a leader in the sector because I always spoke about it,” says Mr Hassan.
In 2019, he went to the US for a fellowship programme. Upon his return, he would lay in motion a plan for quitting Nondo.
“A lot of people came to me. They told me, ‘Hassan, why should you not apply for this?’” he recalls.
He applied, attended interviews and was given the job. With that appointment, which goes for a renewable term of three years, he heads the organisation that gives cards to those proven by the Ministry of Health to be disabled — for them to enjoy the benefits extended to the disabled.
He ensures those living with albinism get the products they need to give them the protection they need.
He has seen to it that students living with disabilities are not given bursaries but full scholarships, his mantra being: “The only way out of poverty for a disabled person or child is education.”
Disabled people who have won tenders also look up to the council to help them get zero-rated bank loans to meet their local purchase order requirements.
He also ensures there is a steady supply of assistive devices to the disabled people. Wheelchairs, artificial legs, tri-cycles, hearing aids, among others need to be there when needed.
“These are extensions of the body of someone. If I don’t use a wheelchair now, I cannot move anywhere,” he says.
The Mr Hassan we spoke with is different from the man who, a few years ago as he stayed in a hut in Mandera, had wished he would die.
“I had no intention of going through life without sensing and using my legs,” he writes in his book. “Just how could I gather the courage to face up to these adoring people and tell them that I wanted to die?”
But he has since learnt to embrace his situation, and this drive partly came with interacting with people living with disabilities who did not seem to remember that they were disabled.
After some time, he was driving again after being taught how to drive a modified car, with a single hand on the steering wheel and the other controlling the other components, and how to move about.
At the time of the accident, he was single but he would get married as a paraplegic, and in his book he recalls his late father cheekily asking him during his stay at a tiny room in Kutulo, Mandera County, whether he was “well enough to marry”.
Mr Hassan, however, prefers to keep his family life private.
Given what he has gone through, he is a man who encourages whoever finds themselves in disability not to despair.
“Everything that happens has been written. Believe in what has happened. And pray to your God to give you wisdom to understand what you can and what you cannot,” he advises.
Beggars with disabilities
We can’t end our interview without seeking his opinion on the beggars with disabilities that are found in the streets. What goes through his mind whenever he sees one?
“I see two things. One thing, which is very obvious, is that because of disability, at the formative years you are denied opportunities of maybe schooling, maybe to propel you to do some gainful or productive activity. And because you are also human and you have needs and you have to survive, and now you don’t have the skills, you use your disability now to woo sympathy and go to the street and beg,” says Mr Hassan.
“The other one is mischievous business going on. And sometimes we are told it’s even cross-border business. You find children with disabilities being brought to the street,” he adds. So, should we stop giving alms to them?
“I might not authoritatively say that because there are some who are genuinely desperate,” he answers. “Refer them to us so that we follow up the stories. “
He goes on: “There are some counties in this country where you don’t see disabled people begging. Like if you go to Garissa County, you won’t see one. But they are there in other counties. And the more urbanised a place is, the more you find a lot of things.”
