David Namagwa, 25, is slowly coming to terms with what happened seven days ago at the collapsed Huruma building where over 40 dead bodies have so far been pulled out of the rubble.

David has a fractured leg with a large cast and a neck brace and a dressing for the wound on his head. He is lucky to be among those rescued after 24 hours by the search team.

Flanked on both sides by his brother, Frederick Namagwa, 30, and his cousin Evans Baraza, 28, at the Mathare CDF holding centre, where relatives and survivors of the collapsed building are being housed, David recounts his experience when an entire building came crashing down on them. They are probably the luckiest three in the hall, as they had all been buried under the rubble. David recalls the events leading to the fatal crash as if they were happening this very moment.

At around 7.30pm, a neighbour told them that a crack had appeared on the lower floors of their flat. His brother and a cousin went downstairs to look at the crack, but decided it was too small to pose any danger. So they went to a nearby grocery to buy vegetables for dinner. At 9.30pm as they were having their meal, they heard people screaming that the building was crashing, and before they could react, a crack started to form on the floor, like a moving snake.

Now panicking, his cousin ran out to the balcony and tried to jump off it but was unsuccessful because a slab came crashing down on his head.

“I had tried following, but as I got on the corridor, a heavy metal door crashed my neck and pinned me down. I was trapped by concrete slabs on every side,” he says. His brother, Fredrick was lying beneath a beam, approximately five feet behind them. For a long while, he heard nothing. Then finally, he heard sounds, “as if someone was trying to talk,” he says, and realised his kin might be in the same place as he was. He called out their names and David made great effort to respond.

His voice was barely above a whimper. “Can you help me?” Fredrick recalls David saying. “I told him I was trapped on all sides but I would try and save him,” he says. There was so sign of their cousin.

David thought he would die: “I had no saliva in my mouth and I was having spasms,” he says. “It was like life was slowly leaving my body.” But Frederick encouraged him to stay strong.

After spending the night buried alive beneath tonnes of concrete, David asked his brother to shout for help and eventually they heard the voices of rescuers saying, “I can hear voices coming from here. There is someone here.” It took rescuers 12 hours to free David, who suffered a broken neck and leg, from the rubble. By the time Frederick was saved hours later, he was dazed and confused, and had temporarily lost his memory. He however did not sustain severe injuries except some pain in his knee, hand and chest, which he says is lessening.

It turned out that their cousin, Evans, had been rescued earlier. Evans has a hairless patch on his head where the slab hit him and many scars, but he says despite some headaches he feels fine. The fact that the three relatives are all alive is something that still amazes them. “When I was discharged from hospital I passed by the collapsed building and could not believe what I saw. How can a human being get out of such a place alive? It is just God,” Frederick adds.