My bizarre trip into the heart of the violence

Last Saturday I took a bit of a major trip - but just for the day - as part of the work I’ve been doing for the past few weeks for my former employer, ACT International, on this Kenya political and humanitarian crisis. There were many bizarre parts to it.

On Thursday, I was asked to come in to the Church World Service office the next morning for an informal meeting with the man I’ve been dealing with, Sam. On Friday morning, he asked me what I was doing on Saturday. “Nothing, really,” I told him. In fact, he had already booked me to fly with him up to Kisumu for the day on Saturday. Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest city and is in the extreme west, on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Now, if you’ve been living in Kenya during this crisis over the presidential election, you’ve been hearing every day on the news, when they’ve been talking about rallies and violence and looting and burning of shops and people killing each other, a few towns, and Kisumu has always been mentioned. Kisumu is where the bedrock of support is for the main opposition candidate, the man who’s in this bitter battle for the presidency, which he says was stolen in the election by the current president. His supporters, mostly of the Luo tribe, which are heavy in the Kisumu area, got so angry at the supporters of the president, who is of the Kikuyu tribe, that the Luos have been taking out the election on the Kikuyus in violent ways. So Sam was taking me into the heart of the violence! Because this is where the violence has been worst, it’s where the people are suffering the most – many people forced from their homes. Sam wanted to take me with him while he assessed the needs for a response by the ACT members and I gathered information and photos for communications purposes. He didn’t tell me we were going until the last minute so I wouldn’t get afraid and back out because of the violence, plus he decided to go quite late on a Saturday, a day the opposition party wasn’t calling for mass action (which has always turned violent). In fact, in the three days before we went there, there were rallies and all sorts of destruction caused.

So quickly to the highlights:

I got up very early on Saturday morning and went to the airport. Who was on the same flight as ours but the member of parliament for Kisumu and the secretary-general of the country's opposition party. And guess who sat next to this secretary-general, one of the top leaders of the Orange Democratic Movement, this well-known professor? Yours truly. It was interesting. All over, even when the plane was in the air, he was treated and spoken to by strangers as a celebrity politician. Well, now that I’ve gotten to “know” him, I see his name all over the place. Since he’s not the candidate who ran for president (and thus doesn’t need to be so diplomatic) but is still a high-ranking leader in the party, he is able to push the party’s aggressive agenda and say the president doesn’t care to cooperate in the peace talks that are going on right now, which I heard him saying on the radio this morning.

In Kisumu, I spent the entire morning with Sam at the compound that is the regional headquarters of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya (affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the U.S.). Then at noon I was whisked off to another ELCK compound to see a small distribution of corn flour take place to some displaced people. Then Sam and a staff member of the Anglican Church of Kenya came to fetch me and we grabbed some Chinese take-away for a late lunch at the food court above the large grocery store in town. We ate this in the truck on our way out of town to see another group of displaced people 40 kilometers away. So here I was in the back seat of the truck, trying to eat very hot Chinese food out of containers that were impossible to open while driving over extremely bumpy roads. It was hard to guide the spoonfuls of food to my mouth, and I was determined not to spill on my white shirt. It’s a good thing I had my Chinese food to concentrate on, because occasionally I looked up at the road and could see many oncoming large trucks and buses that we were whizzing by at a high rate of speed, barely missing each time.

The other bizarre thing about our afternoon trip was that, behind me, in the bed of the truck, we were transporting a coffin. Mind you, it was empty, but Sam mentioned something about a man in this other town we were driving to whose wife had died and how he wasn’t able to get a coffin to bury her in there or wasn’t able to transport the coffin from the big city of Kisumu, so could we bring a coffin when we came…I didn’t quite understand the story – I just sort of went along with it because it was too strange to ask about. So we had picked up this coffin before we left town in a part of Kisumu where there were many shops that made wooden coffins and displayed them out on the street (I bet they were doing a brisk business in this period).

Believe me, people, I’m not making any of this up!

After stopping several times to pick up various people and goods and drop them off, after two hours, we arrived in Muhoroni, where we met with some government official at a place behind which were living many displaced families. After several minutes of this meeting, I pulled out my flight schedule and declared to Sam and all present that I was going to miss my flight, which was due to leave in about two hours back in Kisumu. Well, there was still some business for our driver to take care of, and we didn’t start heading back until 5:00 for my 6:40 flight. He assured me that I would not miss my flight. So we drove back on the same bumpy roads (luckily I didn’t have to worry about eating a meal of Chinese food this time) and actually got to the airport a half hour before my flight was to leave. I was happy to be there and be on my own, where there were fewer chances of any more bizarre things happening to me that day. Fortunately, this was the case. I was safe at home again by 8:00 after an adventurous day.

I will post on this blog the feature article I write from this trip.