Our STORY
The ReasonWe are FightingMeningitis
Des and Ajoke Braithwaite set up BoOM4GOOD in memory of their daughter, Temi. Hear their story in their own words.
“My wife and our youngest daughter were in England when the news broke. It was quite a rude shock when a police officer knocked at the door around 7 pm at night to inform my wife about the sad news. And thereafter, my youngest daughter, Funke, called me in Nigeria and was screaming on the phone. I couldn’t get what she was saying but out of the screaming I heard ‘Temi is dead’. I just put the phone down. It was a shock. It was unbelievable. My mind refused to process the reality of the situation. That was how I reacted,” Des recalled.
Mrs. Braithwaite also remembered her last moment with Temi who had earlier called, one week before her eventual death, that she was not feeling well.
“She called me a week earlier that she fell and broke her wrist, but it wasn’t anything serious. Again, she said she had been having flu-like symptoms and we didn’t think that it was serious. On Sunday, I went to England and didn’t want my children to know that I was in England. On Tuesday, I called her, but she didn’t pick her phone and on Wednesday I kept calling but she didn’t pick I was saying within me that ‘If I catch this girl’ but nothing happened. I thought she may be in the library, so I shrugged it off.
“It was on Thursday evening that I got a call from her flatmates who sent a text that I should call this number it is about Temi. And because I hadn’t got hold of her, I thought maybe as young students they had run into troubled waters. I just ignored it until the police came and because I had worked within the system, I know that when you see a male and female police officer there is a problem”.
“They asked me: ‘Do you have a daughter called Temi?’ They now gave me the date of birth of my son and I said I spoke to him and he is fine. They went back to get confirmation and that was when they passed the message that ‘Temi has passed’. I was just saying let me go and see her. They said no they had moved her to the morgue. My husband took the next available flight and rushed down to the UK”.
“In life when they say time stood still, it does because the time we were waiting for my husband was the longest time ever. That was how we faced it. We now travelled to Swansea the following day to see her and of course, doing that was the hardest thing. Identifying her was difficult because it was the first opportunity to see her. I remember on the train so many thoughts were running through my mind. I was like if only she had had a child. Her death was shocking you know when you don’t want a beautiful thing to finish.”
“We eventually saw her looking beautiful just as if she was sleeping. That moment was helpful. It was very difficult but necessary and which is why I advocate for any bereaved person or who has lost a child to see the remains though in our culture they say we shouldn’t see the child. But it helps (to see the remains). It is part of the grieving process.”
“The postmortem revealed that she died of meningitis. Actually, our first son had meningitis the year before, but he was lucky to have been taken to the hospital and got the right antibiotics on time. We didn’t know what it was even though we had been a victim through our son, and it is not something people pay much attention to.
“After my daughter’s demise we just said is this a calling from God to do something or to make up (for) something. We now established an NGO to create awareness about the virus. We tried to do it in the UK but it didn’t work and we said we should bring the campaign to Nigeria because Nigeria is on the middle belt of meningitis and it is quite prevalent in the North. Meningitis is a silent killer and very little is known about it.”
“We established an NGO in her memory on the first anniversary of her death.”
Boot out Meningitis for Good Foundation, BoOm4Good, was launched on December 12, 2015, with a 5km walk from the Lagos Motor Boat Club (LMBC), followed by a breakfast talk.
