2016’s Most Heartbreaking Stories

The tragic, painful death of a young Kenyan Mother of four, Mary Kamajo, due to the cruel treatment she suffered at the hands of her Lebanese employer easily registers as one of the most heart-wrenching incidents of 2016.

Kamajo, 31, had moved to Lebanon in search of work, but without formal qualifications, she took up the only work she could find: working as a domestic maid for a Lebanese family. Kamajo perhaps expected her work as a domestic maid to be demanding, however, nothing would have prepared her for the brutal, subhuman treatment meted out by her Lebanese boss and his family.

Events took a vicious turn in April, when Kamajo’s boss willfully set her ablaze by igniting a gas cylinder, leaving her with horrendous burn wounds that covered nearly 47 percent of her body.

She was rescued by a kind neighbor who rushed her to a hospital, but that was hardly the end of her ordeal as she was held in near complete seclusion and denied access to her family and loved ones back home in Kenya.

Narrating her ordeal, Kamajo said, “I would cry every day, begging the doctors and the nurses to send me home but nobody listened. I begged to be allowed to speak to the Kenyan embassy but the people in the hospital ignored me.”

Kamajo was eventually returned to Kenya, after spending six hellish weeks in a Lebanese hospital. But that was hardly enough to keep her alive as she lost the battle to stay alive and passed away in July.