As Cord prepares for another anti-IEBC demo, staff at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital, otherwise known as ‘Russia’, are not a very pleased lot.
They will not be in a hurry to forget the Monday anti-IEBC demos that converted the beautiful Kisumu City to a ghost town without preamble.
The medical and support staff at the renowned referral hospital did not imagine that the hospital compound would become a battlefront of sorts, though briefly, but with ‘damaging’ effects according to a nurse who only identified herself as Mercy.
“We were preparing to go for our lunch break at around 1.00 pm when the menacing water canon passed by the hospital, which is right along the Kisumu-Kakamega Highway. The water canon was heading to Kondele to deal with a very difficult group there,” Mercy explained.
“There were those demonstrators who were running away from the feared water cannon, but when they one found one our gates open, they got into the compound of the hospital and started throwing stones at the vehicle,” she narrated.
On realising that there were some protesters inside the hospital compound pelting the police vehicle with stones, the angered police officers manning the mammoth vehicle started started spraying them with water.
“The trouble is that the water cannon did not spare our canteen where we normally eat. All the food that had been prepared was washed with the dirty water. And then out of the hospital was a no-go zone with all businesses shut down,” lamented Mercy.
Mercy and other staff members at ‘Russia’ are not happy with what happened, even though they later had a late lunch after the town’s temperatures had died down.
“It was not a very good experience considering that more and more patients shot and injured in the demos were being referred to our facility and so most of work had to work with a lot of pressure but with nothing in the stomach,” she lamented.
Mercy wants the demonstrators to keep off Russia hospital and their coming there only breeds misfortune.
“If they must get into the hospital because the gates cannot be closed as patients come and leave, then they should be reasonable enough to avoid taunting the police officers with stones,” she said.