Life's a Blast

It happens, doesn't it? Life is great, you lead a charmed life. Enjoy privileges denied others because of opportunities that come your way, and which you take full advantage of. It helps if the social-economic strata you come from enables you to confront those opportunities and make the most of them. But then, that's life, isn't it? Some are born to opportunities, some are bereft, throughout their lives, of opportunity.

In the case of a 20-year-old Kenyan, a student by the name of Isaiah Otieno, whose life was that veritable bowl of cherries, life interacted with pure blind bad luck. And who might have thought it possible? Certainly not he. On his way to post a letter, walking along a street in Cranbrook, British Columbia, in a nice residential area, where there could be no hint of anything untoward about to happen. To him.

He had been speaking with his father, Dalmas Otieno, minister of public services in Kenya, only a few hours earlier. Someone just passing by noticed Isaiah as he walked along the street. Happiness and contentment are notable and noticed by onlookers, bystanders perhaps envious, perhaps appreciating. Said this witness to the event: "I thought to myself, now there's a happy-looking guy", said Joe Pierre, a school teacher.

"It was his face. It was his gait. He just looked happy - and then wham! It just happened in that second."

That's it, that's all it takes. The world is your oyster, and suddenly the oyster is engulfed by a huge tidal wave of chemical-infused wastewater, and it expires. In Mr. Otieno's case, a business student attending school in Canada, that tidal wave came in the shape of a helicopter that appeared to be suffering mechanical problems. The helicopter precipitously descended, crashing into that very same residential street that Mr. Otieno was walking along.

That happy and fulfilled youth, full of the promise of a future of opportunity had company in his unfortunate departure from life; the pilot and two B.C. Hydro technicians. Enough pain and sorrow to be shared out, radiating from four families mourning their incomparable loss.