Jan 2008

We wake up in the dark, chinks of brilliant sunlight thru the gaps on the steel shutters over the windows. My back hurts from yet another night squeezed on the air mattress. The shared single gradually deflates every night so that my center of weight sinks lower and lower, kinking my back and neck. Rachel's mom calls with her morning update, right on schedule. Apparently Red Cross is sending out calls for aid as over a thousand people, displaced by riots and fires, have surrounded the Kericho Police Station. Thats about a 20 minute walk from us. Last night in El Doret (about two hours from my home outside Kabarnet) 50 people taking refuge in a church were killed when it was set on fire.
The opposition leader, Raila Odinga, has built a sucessful multi-ethnic coalition which now finds itself at odds with Kibaki and his supporters(the dominant Kikuyu minority that has controlled much of the government for the last 40 years). The violence and destruction which began between party supporters has dissolved, as it always does, into tribalism. The only difference is that this time, the other tribes have unified against Kibaki and his Kikuyu base. The church burning and the attacks against a formerly dominant minority can't help but remind me of Rwanda. The fire was a rather shocking end to a fairly quiet day and precipitated a large number of phone calls from family and friends at home. They came throughout the night as we sat up in turn to repeat the same reassurances and explanations to our constituent bases in Colorado, California, Illinois, Alabama, Texas and Minnesota.
Today however - for the first time in almost a week - there is a real reason to get up. Today contains more than card playing, reading and the terrifying domesticity of going out for groceries without getting tear-gassed or shot. Each Peace Corps country has an Emergency Action Plan (EAP): a manual for what to do when things get like they are now. The most basic part of it is consolidation: volunteers move together to a secure central locations. This makes security - and when necessary, extraction - easier to manage. What is obvious now that was not before is that consolidation only works when we can a) travel and b) have somewhere safe to travel too. There is no gas in Kericho and anyway the roads are blocked by informal and sometimes violent roadblocks. Beyond that, the majority of the originally planned consolidation points are in larger cities like Kisumu, Nairobi, Mombasa, El Doret, and Nakuru. Essentially, in all the places where the worst violence is already occurring.
The new consolidation plan as developed by our Country Director Ken Puvak (who has been extraordinarily available, helpful and encouraging over the last week) is for us to go to the Walter Reed Project's guesthouse in the tea fields outside Kericho. They want us out of the city; somewhere with more security than Marcus' steel shutters and concrete walls can afford. We are mostly just excited to leave the two rooms we have been in for the past five days. We pack all the food and spices, our clothes and sleeping bags. Dan has a massive 45 pound trail backpack full of two weeks worth of clothes, books, batteries and - as we discovered last night - candles. In any other travel circumstances I would mock him, but given that I have already been away from site for a week and will be gone at least one more, my choice for space efficiency over comfort was a mistake. Should we have to run from a crowd while carrying our luggage (a distinct possibility) I will certainly win. But if in so doing, I get my pants dirty, and I only have one other set of bottoms to change into. Should we be evacuated to Tanzania or Uganda for a significant length of time, there is always a chance that the country will be closed to Peace Corps service by the US government. In that case, it questionable whether we will be allowed to retrieve anything from our homes here. Four or five notebooks of story ideas, journal entries, notes on the economics of development will be lost to me, along with my cowboy hat, my guitar, all my clothes and my laptop (newly smuggled from Tanzania). Small things in the face of the larger issues occuring around us, but regrets I can't help but consider watching Marcus indulge the luxury none of us have had: packing with the knowledge he may not come back.
The car arrives. Another in the endless chain of white Land Rovers that make up the mobile fleet of Western aid here. The Walter Reed Project is the medical research branch of the American Army and their office in Kericho does a lot of work on vaccines. The guest house is used for visiting VIPs or academics. We meet Doug, the Walter Reed director in Kericho. Within two minutes of driving we are further from Marcus' house than we have been in the last week. Charles' mom calls. It seems Kenya has successfully passed Pakistan in the international news queue; the first headline on CNN.com, Yahoo News and others is now election violence here in Kenya. Apparently fifty refuge seekers burned to death in a church is too dramatic to ignore. It's unfortunate that the odd 200 other people killed in the past few days didn't manage to die in such a unified and tragic way. If their deaths had been coordinated and more symbolic, maybe the would have made the news ticker during "Campaign 2008" coverage. We stop at the Barclay's near town center to empty out our bank accounts. Cash is a necessity at this point: the two loaves of bread we found yesterday were four times their normal price.
The roads are blocked once or twice every mile with makeshift barricades of stones or tires. There are massive scorch marks on the tarmac from fires the night before. The innumerable tiny road side stands are overturned and burned in the street. There are few cars. Looking down the main road in the center of Kericho, we can see the slums that sit just outside of town. Mile upon mile of steel shacks lacking running water or reliable electricity. At the Stagematt closest to the slums rioters broke through the steel bars over the windows. In the ensuing looting the police shot and killed 14 people. Among the sooty stains on the sidewalk, I can imagine their blood pooling in the street.
We head out of town, past the empty matatu stage and abandoned city park, up into the tea fields. The landscape is the same verdant green it always is. The tea fields stretching to the horizon have a quiet, meticulous order heedless of the chaos just a few minutes away. In the colonial era the tea estates were operated as countries of their own.They are gated and posess their own chains of supply to dry goods, vegetables and petrol. We pass rows and rows of worker's houses built in 30k gallon water tanks with windows; concentric circles arranged into towns.
The guest house lies deep in the body of the tea estate. Doug's house is just before ours off to the right. Small clusters of monkeys sit atop the tall wood fence. He tells us about the two Kikuyu families he is sheltering in the wake of the election. Our house is surrounded by meticulously maintained gardens and lawns. Our personal askari, Nelson, greets us, waving to the cars with his night stick tucked under his left arm.
Coming from the two rooms and all corn diet we have enjoyed for the last week, the house here is shocking: five bedrooms, two full baths with hot showers, a large kitchen, fully equipped dining room and den, satellite TV, a veranda with covered couches and chairs, a freezer full of meat, a 50lb bag of rice and a fireplace with a fully stocked wood shed. We are exhausted and overwhelmed by the opulence in which we suddenly find ourselves enveloped. There is a large finely clipped lawn and two friendly and playful dogs. We have gone from bomb shelter rationing to a vacation.
There is no way - even pooling resources - that the seven of us could afford such a beautiful and fully equipped house. We enjoy luxury, comfort and safety today expressly and explicitly because other people in Kericho are experiencing misery, destruction and death. The giddy pleasure of this safe, bright and comfortable place sits like a stone in my stomach as I consider Marcus' neighbors and co-workers back in their own homes. This compound is only the first of the dozen safety nets that await us with further violence and unrest. Those we have lived next door to for the last week do not have a safe-house to escape to, much less a whole other country. On any other random day I would be at site, in my own house, combatting lonliness and boredom, trying to build a life out of half understood interactions and good intentions. Instead, the tremendous death toll and hunger experienced by the citizens of Kericho has created for me a vacation in this place: a paradise in comparison to anything we have become accustomed to in the last seven months. I wonder, for the hundreth time, what it will be like to return to site after all this. Combined with that is the question of whether I will return at all; whether, after this is all over, I can see myself going back to site and picking up where I left off.