Jeridah Andayi is no stranger to most Kenyans, thanks to her distinct voice and illustrious radio career spanning slightly over two decades.
The media personality who works at Royal Media Services as the Head of Radio Citizen has three children Victor, Norah and Neema.
Recently, her son relocated to the United States where he will be playing professional football.
Here is what WoK has gathered about Andayi’s son.
Background
Victor plays in the USL Championship, a professional men’s soccer league in the US that began its inaugural season in 2011.
Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, USL is sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation as a Division II league since 2017, placing it under Major League Soccer in the hierarchy.
The championship was formed as result of the merger of their USL First and Second Divisions following the 2010 season.
The United Soccer Leagues stated that the merger would strengthen the league’s position within the American professional soccer landscape through stability, commercial growth and the professional development of soccer.
A video on his Tik Tok showed that the young man plays for Birmingham Legion.
His team played a friendly against Hartford Athletic on Saturday, March 25 and won one goal to nill.
Birmingham Legion FC is based in Birmingham, Alabama.
The team was established in August 2013 and played under the name Birmingham Hammers until 2018 when they began their first professional season as Legion FC.
Their first professional game resulted in a 2–0 defeat against Bethlehem Steel FC.
Legion FC plays its home matches at Protective Stadium, which also serves as the Blazers’ home field.
Victor has always played football, even while in Kenya.
In 2019, Andayi disclosed how much his son loved playing football in a heartfelt birthday message on her Facebook page.
“It’s my son’s birthday. This boy knows what he wants. He wants soccer. Anything else is details. To him, those details make sense after soccer,” she wrote in part.
Daughter’s loss
In 2022, Andayi opened up about dealing with the unexpected loss of her second born daughter.
She tearfully narrated how she watched her daughter die after a trip to the doctor turned fatal owing to a road accident.
In 2008, Andayi was at work when she got word that her daughter had suddenly fallen ill.
She rushed to her daughter and ferried her to hospital where a doctor advised that the infant needed to be admitted for monitoring.
“On our way to the hospital, the ambulance we were riding in got involved in a head-on-collision with another vehicle. I was holding my daughter at the time and she slipped and hit the vehicle’s sides but didn’t fall from my grasp
“I didn’t think about it much at the time since my girl was sleeping but I later realised that the impact of the accident had done a number on her,” she said.
Adding;
“There was a hospital attendant who was sitting at the back of the ambulance with us and he quickly got off to see what exactly was going on. He then came back, looked at my daughter and signaled the ambulance’s driver that we needed to leave immediately
“All this time the ambulance’s driver was arguing with the driver of the vehicle we rammed into. It all happened so fast but by the time we got to hospital my child was technically dead.”
Andayi said doctors tried to resuscitate her daughter at the Emergency Room (ER) for almost an hour, adding that attendants did everything in their power to bar her from accessing the room.
“I tried to get in the ER but the doctor refused and I kept trying until they finally let me in. The doctor asked for the child’s father, who was not there at the time but joined me later before telling us that our daughter was technically a cabbage,” she said.
The doctor advised the young couple to either put their daughter on life support or let her go since she was brain dead.
“Everyone said we put her in ICU and we did and she stayed in there for seven days and I watched my daughter die slowly in those seven days,” she said
