WILMINGTON, Del. — A former college rugby player who toured U.S. colleges and churches urging people to help children in war-riven Uganda was among 74 killed by explosions that tore through crowds in two places watching the World Cup final in the African country’s capital, Kampala.
At least four Americans were wounded in the violence Sunday. Al-Shabab, which means “The Youth,” an ultraconservative Islamic group from Somalia that has drawn comparisons to Afghanistan’s Taliban, on Monday claimed responsibility for the bombings.
Nate Henn was on a rugby field Sunday in Kampala with some of the children he’d gone to help when he was hit by shrapnel from one of the blasts and killed, according to the aid group he worked for. A Uganda native whom Henn mentored traveled back to the country with him and was standing next to him, but 20-year-old Innocent Opwonya wasn’t harmed.
“Right now he’s so broken he can barely talk,” said Jedidiah Jenkins, spokesman for the San Diego-based aid group Invisible children, said of Opwonya. “Nate was just his father figure, his brother, his family.”
Henn, 25, had spent the last year traveling to campuses and churches to raise money and seek volunteers for work in Uganda. Henn raised thousands of dollars for children’s education and went to the country to meet the children, the aid group said.
The children called Nate Henn “Oteka,” or the strong one, and they “fell in love with Nate’s wit, strength, character and steadfast friendship,” Invisible Children, which helps child soldiers, said on its website.
Henn’s former youth pastor, the Rev. Andrew Hudson of Dresher, Pa., said Henn knew that traveling in Africa could be dangerous. “Nate was willing to take that risk in order to provide hope and healing for precious children who were finding themselves in very difficult situations,” Hudson said.
His sister Brynne Henn wrote on her Facebook page: “I just don’t understand. Please pray.”
As a teenager in Wilmington, Henn volunteered at an orphanage and went on a church mission to Peru. “He always wanted to help people; never met a stranger, ever,” former neighbor Melanie Mask recalled .
At least four Americans from a Pennsylvania church group were wounded in a second attack, at an Ethiopian restaurant, a nation despised by al-Shabab.
One of the wounded was 16-year-old American Emily Kerstetter.
“Emily was rolling around in a pool of blood screaming,” said Lori Ssebulime, an American who married a Ugandan. “Five minutes before it went off, Emily said she was going to cry so hard because she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay the rest of the summer here.”
Other Americans, also part of the Pennsylvania church group and identified in photographs taken in Kampala hospitals, were Kris Sledge, Pamela Kramer and Thomas Kramer.
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