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In My Opinion

In the midst of post election violence, protestors hold up their hands in front of riot police in the Mathare slum in Nairobi, Kenya. (AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

Your Company Brought Our Nieces Home

Brittanie Vander Mey, Aubrey Vander Mey, and Jamie Cook volunteered last year to help Kenyan children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, but murderous mobs cut their humanitarian visit short in January 2008. The Vander Mey family credits Blackwater Worldwide with saving their lives.

The 19- and 20-year-old Michigan women had been at an orphanage in Kimilili, 180 miles from Nairobi, for a short while when post-electoral violence swept parts of the country. About 40 miles away, mobs rounded up villagers, barricaded them in a church, and burned them alive. With armed militias controlling the roads the frightened women called home.

Mobs ran through the streets, threatening people and burning cars. “People were yelling at us in Swahili—we didn’t know what they were saying,” said Jamie Cook upon her return. “We had people calling us, telling us to run…we had to get out of there as soon as possible.” One of the sisters recalled thinking, “Are we going to make it out alive?”

Back in Michigan, Brittanie and Aubrey’s father, Dean Vander Mey, made an estimated 400 telephone calls to find a way to evacuate his girls and other missionary workers.

But nobody could help. Local Grand Rapids congressman, Rep. Vernon Ehlers called Blackwater owner Erik Prince, who immediately called Vander Mey and told him, “We’re going to do everything we can do to get your girls out.”

As Bill Sizemore of the Virginia-Pilot of Norfolk reported, “A Blackwater employee flew from Afghanistan to run the operation,” and “the company located a 10-passenger single-engine plane, which picked up the women at an airstrip near the orphanage,” and whisked them to safety in Nairobi, where they flew home by commercial jet.

Blackwater wouldn’t take payment for the services. “Erik wouldn’t hear of it,” Vander Mey recalled. “He said, ‘This has nothing to do with money. This is about getting Americans out of harm’s way.’ They got it done. I was pretty impressed.” (See relative’s letter on the following page.)

“I definitely will go back again,” said one woman in an impromptu interview with the Grand Rapids Press. Added another, “I feel like brand new.”
To view a video interview with the women on their return to Michigan, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqTZqwClak8.

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From the March/April 2008 issue of Serviam.