Marlin Olga.
“Olga (Marlin) is already in heaven. What an intercessor we have! Let us offer many Masses for her.”
The forwarded message from my sister, Victoria Amulega, landed in my WhatsApp inbox at 5.59pm on Sunday, January 5. I was stunned, not because I had not seen it coming but because death is that reality that we love to wish away.
Only 54 days earlier — on Tuesday, November 12 —I had the privilege of seeing Olga on what was to be our last earthly encounter. It was at the Samara residence of Kianda School on her 90th birthday and this was only because four days earlier, I had shared a video with Miss Mercedes Otaduy, the Director of Kianda Foundation, on the newly elected president of the United States of America, Donald Trump. It ended with a request to “…please pass my warm regards to my dearest friend, Dr Olga Emily Marlin.”
I jumped at the possibility of seeing Olga who in recent years had become ‘a rare commodity’ due to her failing health. Except for one other occasion last year, I lost count of the many unanswered requests to see Olga. Even now, it was to be an agonising three days of waiting for a response before Mercedes finally sent a message: “…tomorrow at around 11 could be good, but just for a very short while.”
I jumped at the opportunity. I was excited at the prospect of reconnecting with this remarkable woman, whom I first met in 1979 after writing an article on the founder of Opus Dei, then Monsignor Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. (Pope John Paul II canonised Josemaria on October 6, 2002). My then editor-in-chief at the Nation, Joe Rodriguez, had assigned me to write the article. A day after the article was published, an impeccably dressed white woman showed up at Nation House, Tom Mboya Street, to thank me for what she described as ‘a beautiful article’.
Zoom session
Olga was then 45 years old. It was the beginning of a friendship that was to last for 45 years until her death. It turns out that I was just one of the hundreds of friends, who have been eulogising Olga since news of her death broke.
At a two-hour Zoom celebration of her life on Thursday evening, speaker after speaker poured out their hearts on who Olga was to them, and the impact she had made on their lives and their families’. Ms Hedaya Mundia, a former HR director of Strathmore University, her alma mater, and an old girl of Mukumu Girls High School, moderated the session, whose capacity had to be expanded midstream and extended to accommodate the eulogists, including yours truly.
Other than Uganda, whose representative, Ms Agrippina Alema Lumiti of Pearlcrest Hospitality Training Institute in Entebbe managed to join the Zoom session, speakers from Cameroon, Nigeria and Rwanda were locked out mainly by connectivity challenges. Agrippina testified that when she was assigned to Olga’s room during her training in Nairobi; she always found the bathroom so clean that she often wondered why she should even clean it.
That the founding member of Kianda Foundation, and first principal of both Kianda College (now Strathmore University), and Kianda School found it fit to clean her own room, even when she had help for the chore, testifies to her great humility. Indeed, speaker after speaker cited humility as a distinct virtue of Olga during the Zoom meeting, in the WhatsApp group, and on the kudoboard created for her.
Olga was also pivotal in the establishment of Kibondeni College, a hospitality school close to Strathmore School in Lavington, Faida Youth Centre, Fanusi Study Centre, Keri Residence (Nairobi), Kimlea College (Limuru), Tewa College (Kilifi) and Uganda’s Pearlcrest.
At the Zoom meeting, the head of High School at Kianda, Carol Kudwoli, and a teacher in the school’s high school section paid glowing tributes to the first principal and founder of their school. They were joined by the directors of the other colleges Olga co-founded: Dorothy Khamisi (Kibondeni and Tewa), Frankie Gikandi (Kimlea) and Maureen Kirori (Fanusi) among others.
Other than her rare humility, Olga’s other most cited virtues and social attributes include loyalty to friendship, kindness, cheerfulness, brutal honesty, courage and daring. Indeed, it is the latter two attributes, coupled with obedience to the founder of Opus Dei that saw her relocate from the comfort of her home country, England, in 1961 to spearhead girls and women’s education in Kenya. She was 26. She is also eulogised as generous, resilient, industrious, loving, available — except when illness and frequent visits to hospital made her handlers wary of visitors. At yesterday’s funeral Mass, before she was laid to rest at Lang’ata cemetery, it was disclosed that she suffered from a blood condition known us myelodysplastic syndrome which is caused by poorly functioning bone marrow.
May her soul rest in eternal peace.
Ms Kweyu is a consulting editor and former parent at Kianda and Strathmore schools. [email protected]
