A bloodied, headless body lay on the ground in front of them. An eerie quietness hang over the area, in contrast to the chaos around them. As Nicholas Obare looked around the scene of the battle in Kariobangi South, at once trying to find the head of the dead man and to absorb the ghastly scene, a man emerged from a house nearby, holding a large machete in his hand.

As he approached them, Obare and his colleagues looked around, hoping to see a policeman. But they had reached before the cops, and now they were likely to be killed too. Their only option, it seemed, was to run. But just as they prepared to flee, the man with the machete explained that it was he who had called them, and that the weapon was for his own protection.

"He then told us about what had happened. A group of people had gone wild, hacking anyone who got in their way. We saw many badly slashed bodies that evening, as we made continuous evacuation trips for six hours into the night," Obare recalls.

In all, 25 people were killed in that incident in March 2003. So gory were the scenes they saw that Obare and his colleagues were badly traumatised.

"We got so disturbed that we later had to call Dr Frank Njenga for counselling," Obare discloses.

His descriptions of the horrendous scenes are enough to curdle anyone's blood, yet situations like this are the norm in his line of work.

Obare, 27, is an emergency medical technician (EMT) with the St John's Ambulance emergency response team, and his whose work often involves spine-chilling drama, most of it traumatising, sometimes life-threatening. He and his colleagues have seen it all.

Talk about the bloody December 2001 Kibera clashes between landlords and tenants, and they will tell you they were there.

And how about the slashing and battering to death of 13 members of an eviction squad by angry tenants of a Mathare North flat in June 2003? They were there as well.

Rewind the clock to 1993 to the tragic accident at the Ngai Ndethya bridge, where some 114 passengers perished after a train plunged into the river below, and they will give you details of what happened soon after the crash. They were in Athi River too, in August 2000, just moments after a goods train snapped, derailed and crashed into a residential area at night, killing about 39 people. They were at the scene of the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi soon after it happened, and at Paradise Hotel in Kikambala after the blast in November 2002.

Wilson Lumadede Mayo, 54, has served the St John's Ambulance for 25 years now, somehow surviving the sights of many ghastly scenes over the years. His comical nature masks vivid memories of tragic sceneries that roll out like a film as he describes his experiences. The Mathare North battle scene is one of them. He and his colleague, Bernard Kilonzo, who has done seven years at St John's Ambulance, were the first emergency rescue personnel to reach the scene.

"The sight was very scary," begins Mayo. "About six people were already dead when we got there, but what frightened me the most was the sight of several badly wounded people gasping for breath and looking up to us as their only saviour. One had such a deep cut on the neck, that some internal organs were visible. We managed to rescue three people despite threats on our own lives by their attackers. Two of them, however, died upon arrival in hospital."

Mayo had been at the scene of the 1993 passenger train disaster at Ngai Ndethya, and was also involved in rescuing survivors of the bombing of Paradise Hotel in Kikambala in November 2002. In both situations, he and his colleagues had to "wade" through bodies as they searched for people who were still breathing.

He narrates his ordeal at Ngai Ndethya: "Ours was the first ambulance to arrive from Nairobi. We had to go right into the river in which the train had plunged in order to see who could be rescued. There were bodies all over the place, and it was such a painstaking exercise."

Then in 2002, while working in Mombasa, Mayo was to drive the first ambulance to the Kikambala bomb scene. "We had to fish among scattered bloody bodies to find people to rescue. That haunted me for about a month, before I pulled myself together," he recalls.

His colleague in long service, 62-year-old Michael Kioko, affirms that it can indeed be very traumatising to keep witnessing injured people endure so much pain.

"One requires to be emotionally strong to cope. There are times when I feel like shedding tears, but then, we have a job to do," he observes.

Kioko, who has served at St John Ambulance for more than 10 years, talks of his involvement in the rescue of victims of the 2001 Kibera clashes and of the Athi River train crash in 2000, as the most dramatic in his career, besides, of course, the 1998 bomb explosion in Nairobi.

The fierce Kibera battle, he recalls, required him and his colleagues to camp in the area for three days. They witnessed crude machete and stone battles that left 25 people dead, and scores others injured. "We were making an average of five trips per day to hospital in rescue operations," he says.

Yet even as they struggled to save others, they had to contend with a persistent threat to their own lives.

Opponents of the injured did not want them saved. "We had to use police protection whenever we drove into a hot zone because there were people bent on attacking us with stones. We had an experience during one of the many Kamukunji riots, when the windows of one of our ambulance vans were smashed with stones by an irate mob. We learnt from that, and this time we became more cautious," he recounts.

As the conversation momentarily shifts to some of the untold risks of their work, it emerges that stubborn know-it-all crowds are often a thorn in the flesh for rescue technicians. Peter Ndung'u, for example, bears the scars caused by such a crowd after their crude interference in a rescue mission.

Ndung'u and his team were cautiously cutting off sections of a car to reach a couple that was trapped inside after an accident, but just as they were about to accomplish the task, some people from the crowd suddenly lunged forward and forcefully ripped open the section that Ndung'u was about to cut loose. In that commotion, pieces of glass went flying. Ndung'u got elbowed and lost balance, and his arm were cut by broken pieces of glass. He and his colleague finally got the couple out of the wreck, but he, too, required first aid.

"Crowds are often a problem, and when they are not kept at bay by the police, they make our work extremely difficult. We have often had to jostle for space with them to be able to attend to the injured," complains Ndung'u. The same crowds, he says, also harbour thieves and pick-pockets, who have no qualms about stealing from the rescuers.

"With time, we have learnt not to go to sites with personal valuables, and we have to vigilantly guard our equipment because that, too, gets stolen. These people do not spare shoes either, and that is one reason we always wear boots whenever we are going on an emergency mission," says Obare.

"Unasaidia wengine huku, na wengine nao wanajisaidia kwako (as you help others, the thieves help themselves too)," he grumbles amid chuckles from his colleagues.

Paul Wachiuri, the head of the emergency team at St John Ambulance, points out that it is not only grisly sights at accident scenes and battlegrounds that leave them emotionally damaged. Situations in which they lose patients they have worked hard to keep alive can also be devastating.

Wachiuri is haunted by the death of a 60-year-old man he worked so tirelessly kept alive in an ambulance all the way from Dandora sometime late last year. The man had suffered a heart attack, and had stopped breathing twice in the van, but Wachiuri managed to resuscitate him both times.

Unfortunately, the man died after arrival at the Kenyatta National Hospital. "I did so much, and the doctors too did their best, but that's it," he says dejectedly.

Ndung'u also recalls the day a woman who had just given birth at home developed complications and died just before reaching the hospital even after he had resuscitated her several times along the way whenever her breathing went faint. "It was so sad for me. There we were, with only the baby," he says.

To get over these and other traumatising aspects of their job, the emergency team hold "critical incidence stress debriefings", open sessions that allow them to talk freely and share their emotions and fears, particularly after an incident.

"This job involves a lot of drama and adventure. Many have come and given up, but we sail on. Some people think we take drugs to be able to cope. To us, we consider this a calling," says Wachiuri.

reprint courtesy ELLY WAMARI [ewamari@nation.co.ke] All Africa