Where does one begin? How does someone who has never lived through the experience of losing a child begin to tell the story; even imagine what it’s like to lose a prize child.

How to begin to describe what it’s like to stare down at a mass grave because your child was so badly burnt they couldn’t be told one from another; the option of signing them out of school and taking them home forever taken away from you. There they will remain for all eternity.

How to describe what it’s like to live in the knowledge that they didn’t pass away peacefully in their sleep, in their twilight years, but trapped like an animal, their flesh seared by the flames, their final breaths agonising as their lungs closed against the smoke; their dreams, your hopes for them left as a pile of ash among the rubble.

How can one who hasn’t lived through it begin to understand what it’s like to carry that knowledge with you for 15 years if you’re lucky, or unlucky, as one may see it…

What it’s like to carry a child for nine months – the apple of your eye, your only child – be separated from them so you can provide by raising other people’s children, living in other people’s homes, cleaning up after them, breaking your back and cracking your fingers washing their dirty laundry; sink everything you make into your child’s education only to have them burn to death where you enrolled them so you didn’t have to worry about them – in their final year of high school.

That is the story of Joyce Wayua and tens of other parents who lost their children on March 26, 2001 in the worst school fire in Kenya’s history, a tragedy of Westgate proportions: the Kyanguli Mixed Secondary School fire in which 63 boys died in an arson attack on their dorm.