Jenny Lobo

by Lynette Noronha nee Lobo (sister) & Roy Lobo (brother)

Jenny was the second child of Leo and Evelyn Lobo. Her father was the well-known motor mechanic who owned a garage in Nairobi and her mother was the daughter of Manuel Antonio Da Silva the famous Goan hunter and East African pioneer.

She attended DRGS from kindergarten to Senior Cambridge. Jenny was happiest playing with her dogs and cats, baking decadent cakes, or gardening in the plot allocated to her in the family garden. She loved the movies and playing doctor with her siblings and her dogs.

Her first choice was to be a nurse but later decided on physiotherapy. She studied at the Royal Bradford School of Physiotherapy in England. On returning to Kenya, she worked at the Bohra Road Clinic that catered to the needs of all categories of disabled children. Jenny loved children and so this was an ideal match. She also worked for the Nairobi Hospital, formerly the Princess Elizabeth Hospital.

Jenny passed away within two years of her marriage, leaving behind her husband, Tony, and Keith, her baby son. Today Keith is a young man who lives and works in Tasmania.

Even today strangers approach me and tell me something nice about her. We, her family, knew that she had an innate gentleness, kindness and generosity about her but we didn't know that she had touched so many people with these same qualities.

There is never a day that we do not think of her. We see her in a young woman holding a baby, or in a beautifully dressed girl with shining hair, or in a bakery window with cakes similar to those she used to bake or, in the pictures of the African savannah where once, when she was five, she fearlessly dragged a marauding iguana her grandfather had shot - a task which her older sibling and cousins were afraid to take on.

Today she lies buried under an African sun, guarded by a statue of the Blessed Virgin and shaded by a pink oleander bush. Jenny was the pink rose that God plucked from our family garden in l974.