A six-year-old child is attracting praise from far and wide after he successfully saved two other children from a burning house.
Richard Kitonga bravely got his two nieces aged four years and two years to safety when the fire broke out in their Machakos home while their mother was away.
Touched by his brevity, his neighbours came together to contribute to the family to rebuild part of the house destroyed by the fire.
A member of the committee handling the contributions, Timothy Kilonzo, noted that the team had raised a sum of Ksh350,000 since the house burnt down a week ago and is still working towards getting the Ksh700,000 deficit.
“We had one small boy who we looked up to as a hero and later we sat we the committee and sat with the family and contributions began.
“To this date, we have raised close to Ksh350,000 and we are short of a budget of Ksh700,000. The construction began immediately,” stated Kilonzo.
The incident occurred shortly after Kitonga’s mother, Damaris Makau, who is a widow, left the three children and headed to the nearby shop.
“I left with my son to go to the shop to buy him a sweet. When we got to the shop, we found it closed. He got back into the compound and I locked it,” she noted.
Upon return, Kitonga found the house on fire and his first instinct was to have his nieces placed in a safe corner as he planned to help them escape the compound through a barbed wire.
The mother noted that when she returned, she found fire engulfing her sitting room but the children were nowhere to be found.
“The fire was in the sitting room and I could not see the children but one of the neighbours told me they were at her house,” she added.
Kitonga noted that she helped them escape for safety first as they went to look for her mother. He took them to a neighbour’s house.
“I found the children outside and saw a huge fire. I asked them to get out through the fence to go look for mum,” stated the little Kitonga.
Source: kENYANS.CO.KE