Personal encouters

Today I spent an hour and a half listening to 4 people who had gone on an assessment mission to some of the towns in northern Kenya where the violence has been particularly bad. They were all counselors and were to assess what could be done for the people affected by the violence in terms of counseling, trauma therapy, etc. They described some pretty horrible situations. People afraid for their lives are living in all sorts of camps – some in or near police stations, others in showgrounds. There isn’t always clean water and the toilets are often far away that the woman are afraid to walk there after dark because of what might happen to them. Roughly 30 babies have been born in the last month in one of the camps that they visited; they don’t have scissors to cut the umbilical cord so they had to use pangas – sort of an all purpose long knife: good for chopping down weeds as well as attacking your fellow man (you might have seen pictures on the tv). There aren’t enough blankets handed out for everyone and single woman or old people can’t make it to the lines fast enough for the supplies of food that are being distributed. Nursing staff in one hospital were down to 1 nurse per ward of 50 people during the day and 1 nurse at night. There is a lot of bitterness and worry over the future – “I am too scared to go home, but if I don’t, who will plant my crops? But if I did go home, where would I get the seeds for the crops and where would I stay as my house is burned to the ground?” Some people are definitely thinking of revenge and getting back what was taken from them. No one knows when the violence will stop and it will truly take a long time for this country to heal.

The team also had a rather traumatizing experience themselves. They narrowly escaped from 1 town as the violence was flaring up again. Then they got stuck in a road block – people had taken stones, large rocks and trees and laid them across the road. They were in the road block for 2 and a half hours and I think truly feared for their lives. They saw a large Greyhound type bus get the passenger door ripped off and the back tire flattened. The mob wanted to kill the bus driver who was from the ‘wrong’ tribe. They were afraid that the regular vehicles would be next, but finally, they were allowed to proceed. One of the members of the team was from Sweden – he’s white – and the other 3 Africans think that because he was with them, they weren’t harassed any further. You could hear the emotion in their voice when they spoke of this part of their trip and I gathered both the men and women shed quite a few tears during the experience.

Closer to home, two of the people that work in my office tried to pay their next month’s rent, but the landlady wouldn’t take it. She didn’t mind them living there, but was afraid if she continued to rent to them there would be trouble. These two gentlemen live in the slum nearest the office and neither makes a lot of money. I am sure they rent on their homes was 1/20 of what our rent is. So they have to find somewhere else for their families to live – and fast. They spoke of moving them to the villages where they come from but it is a question of expense and safety in getting them there. You can tell from the last paragraph that travel by road can be harrowing. The one guy has 8 kids – I don’t know how old the eldest is, but I don’t think any of them are independent yet though a couple of them may be in boarding school (which is typical here). They both plan to stay in Nairobi without their families and continue to work. The office may end up storing whatever larger possessions they have as to move them out of Nairobi would be way too expensive.

I feel very fortunate – and a little guilty – for all that I have. I hope you do to.