I Was There: Volunteer Marilyn Hann on the aftermath of the Westgate terror attack

A deadly terrorist attack at an up market Kenyan shopping centre claimed the lives of 67 people in September, including six Britons.

As the deadly assault on the Westgate mall in Nairobi unfolded, a team from the British Red Cross were dispatched to support victims from the UK.

Mother-of-two Marilyn Hahn - a volunteer with the charity for 25 years - comforted relatives of the tragedy and helped bereaved families cope with their loss.

The council worker from Preston, Lancashire, visited Kenyan hospitals and mortuaries and saw firsthand the aftermath of the atrocity.

"I got the call about six o’clock on Saturday evening, the day the siege had taken place.

I am on call for a month or two every year and I happened to be on call during September.

Head office rang and asked if I could go out to Nairobi and if could I could get to Heathrow Airport by 11 o'clock that evening. Bearing in mind I live in Preston in Lancashire the answer at that stage had to be ‘no’.

But then I got another phone call saying the flight from Heathrow had been moved to six o’clock the following morning so my answer then was ‘yes’.

I got my suitcase ready, called my family in, and had a panic. My husband then very kindly drove me down to the airport because we couldn't get a flight down and I arrived at Heathrow at two o’clock in the morning.

My family were scared on my behalf but they know it’s what I do. I’ve got a son and a daughter who are incredibly realistic, my son is in the navy and my daughter is a solicitor, and they both know it is what I have trained to do.

If you’re trained to help, you want to use that training to help other people.

But it wasn’t until I got to Heathrow that it thought about the practicalities of what I had let myself in for. At the airport we had a very good security briefing from a Red Cross Officer, which was very reassuring but it also suddenly made it very real.

On the plane, I caught up on some sleep because I had already been up all night driving down and knew I would be working straight away in Kenya.

When I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta Airport there was a degree of nervousness in the air. There were clearly people who had arrived in Kenya to find their loved ones.

We then went straight to the British High Commission and met the rest of the team who had been working solidly since the incident happened. We were briefed and then started to sort out who would be doing what, and what was needed.

That night, and it was already late, we went around the local hospitals to get a feel for the number of British nationals that had been admitted. We spoke to reception and checked that the names we had were actually in the hospital.

At that stage the hospitals were relatively quiet, it was the lull after the initial chaos at Westage, and while they were busy they weren’t overwrought. I then went back with the team to get a couple of hours sleep.

The next day I went with someone from the commission to the local mortuary to support two British workmates who were looking for another of their colleagues. Unfortunately they found their friend at the mortuary and we had to support them and help them to know what to do next.

You can’t change a horrible situation like that but you can try and help someone to get through it. It’s a case of supporting them, talking to them and just being there for them.

Later that day, I went back to the High Commission before returning to the mortuary to help try and identify some British Nationals that we believed were there.

At that time, the mortuary was overwhelmed, a number of bodies had come in and, sadly, we were unable to positively identify the Brits. The bodies, however, were subsequently identified at a later date.

For the rest of the week I was out there, we supported a number of relatives at the local hospitals as well as taking someone to identify a loved one.

We also tried to support the High Commission staff, some of whom had been in the complex when it had happened and had come back into work.They were amazing. They were struggling but had to deal with it because they knew they had a job to do.

We then visited the Westgate complex to see our colleagues at the Kenyan Red Cross. They did an incredible job. They had been into the centre and had helped people escape, as well as bringing out the injured and the dead. You can only imagine what it must have been like for them.

We were there to do a job and we were in a far better position than the people we were helping. We could go home to our families and our lives whereas many lives out there had changed forever."