Twitter delivers a miracle for family in need

On Tuesday morning last week, Ng’endo Machua was a girl who felt the weight of the world on her young shoulders. She was staring at a Sh500,000 hospital bill for her elderly mother’s ankle surgery with no idea where she was going to get the money.

With few options, Ng’endo, 24, took out her phone, logged into her favourite social website Twitter and “tweeted”: “Anyone have Ksh485,000 just lying around?”

She often took to Twitter to communicate her thoughts or any odd observations, and was not expecting much from the tweet.

Initial replies

The initial replies she got were hilarious, with a number of the 1,978 friends she has on the social platform teasing her and trying to guess what the money was for.

But her next tweet changed her family’s fortunes. “Whoa ... right now I’m open to any ideas. #British needs ankle replacement surgery and it amounts to almost 500k ...”

“Nobody thought my first tweet was that serious but when I told them about my mum’s surgery, everything changed,” says Ng’endo. “People started consoling me, asking how they could help.”

The next day, Ng’endo, a social media brand strategist at a local agency, took to her blog and poured her heart out.

“I am the last born in a family of four siblings and I have been taking care of my mother since her health started failing. My mother, British, is 70 years old, and has faced a number of health problems. She has severe arthritis, kidney problems and has suffered two strokes. She has also had her right leg amputated twice and now she is due for ankle replacement surgery ... again,” read part of the post. “After talking to the surgeon, the total cost of the surgery amounts to almost Sh500,000.”

Due to her mother’s medical history, the family has exhausted its resources and due to her age and pre-existing conditions, no insurance company would take her in, leaving Ng’endo and her siblings with the arduous task of looking for the money.

Until Ng’endo saw another side of social media she hadn’t imagined existed.

“I felt like I was seeing Jesus perform a miracle,” is all she could say as she saw a social media strategy unravel right before her eyes.

“People on Twitter started asking how they could help and a friend called and said I should open an account and use it to get guys to help. I am still in shock,” she said.

She set up the Twitter account @TeamBritish and asked people to follow it and pledge some money towards the surgery.

Ng’endo calls her mother, Grace Ngina, “British” after Queen Elizabeth. “She’s very proper in all she does. She’s extremely neat, she speaks the Queen’s English and she can be bossy when it calls for. In fact my uncles call her ‘Mubritish’ then my siblings just shortened it to ‘British’,” she explains.

Within 24 hours, Ng’endo had raised Sh100,000 for her mother and more kept coming.

“Complete strangers were sending money for my mother. It is overwhelming that people I’ll probably never meet have helped me this much. What shocked me was that I thought I would get more help from Facebook because my friends there know me and my mother, but I only got one response. Twitter has been where the donations have been pouring in from and I am still in shock,” says Ng’endo.

While she was still marvelling at the kindness of strangers, more good news came her way.

Second opinion

“My siblings, all of them out of the country, asked me to seek a second opinion. I went to the same doctor who amputated my mom’s leg and he told me he could do the surgery for Sh150,000 next Tuesday. I could not believe it. God is clearly watching over my mother,” she says.

By Friday evening, Ng’endo had raised Sh161,000. She closed the donations, with the family pledging to give the extra Sh11,000 to anyone in need.

“Even as I worried where the money would come from, God gave me such peace and I knew we were going to raise this amount somehow. A big up to my Twitter and Facebook friends who are doing such an amazing fundraising job … we are forever indebted.”