Eldoret’s trauma

Eldoret is Kenya’s fourth largest city. Located in the heart of the Rift Valley, the stage of the worst tribal clashes that grasped Kenya at the start of 2008. This is the area where the church was set to fire, burning at least 30 Kenyans alive. This is also the area were thousands of people fled from the violence, leaving their homes literally burning, chased as they were by armed gangs. This is the area where still the most IDP camps are situated (IDP = Internally Displaced Persons, preferably not called ‘refugees’, as this expression implicates that these people will never be able to return to the places where they have run away from).

News that never made it to Nairobi, let alone to the rest of the world:
* more churches have been set to fire, not only that one church that served as a symbol of how deep Kenya was sliding down
* not only Kikuyu (often portrayed as the ruling class, that was chased by all other Kenyan tribes) have found refuge in these camps; even today there are still camps existing hosting Kalenjin IDPs (the people that form the largest number in this area)
* the crisis has left communities completely divided; at schools, Kikuyu kids no longer mingle with their Kalenjin classmates and vice versa; churches are split, with Kalenjin celebrating mass in one building, and Kikuyu meeting in prayer at a different venue
* Eldoret is completely deserted after sunset, as if the residents are voluntarily obeying a curfew; the crisis may be ‘solved’, still nobody is willing to be out there after dark

Eldoret was my base for a couple of days, to assist with a Trauma Awareness Workshop organized by the Coalition for Peace in Africa (COPA). The COPA secretariat may have been situated in Nairobi for quite some years now, never was there a reason to implement any programme in the host country. Up till now. The recent violence in Kenya has led COPA to initiate a programme aimed at the regions that are worst hit by the crisis. In this programme, the expertise of the COPA members in the fields of trauma healing, reconciliation and peace keeping is deployed. The Trauma Awareness workshop is tailor made to give local community leaders (like church leaders, but also representatives of women’s groups) instruments to heal the deep wounds left in society by the recent crisis. Only by addressing these traumas the tension, which is still simmering under the surface, can be diverted, preventing new outbreaks of violence. And without adequate attention for their traumas, the victims of today might just as well turn into the perpetrators of tomorrow.

And the people of Eldoret and its surroundings are truly and heavily traumatized. Without an exception all workshop participants draw the most gruesome symbols of the violence, illustrating the touching stories they are sharing. Guns, pangas (machetes) and bows and arrows play the lead in their stories. They all have eye-witnessed the dead victims lying in the streets, which seemed to be left there carelessly – people did not dare to pick their beloved, in order to give them a proper funeral. Now they all avoid that one spot, terrified as they are for the scenes that are stuck in their memories.

Images that made it to the international news bulletins and that have left a profound impression here in Eldoret: those mobs of youths emanating an unprecedented aggression, those houses that were set to fire apparently arbitrarily, that church in flames packed with people, that boy with an arrow piercing his scalp, that toddler crying on the bed with his lifeless mum lying in a splash of blood on the ground.

Not to mention the heavy personal losses some of the participants have been facing: a woman who lost both her husband and her cousin, a man who saw his own house being set to fire, another man who discovered his friend in a pile of bodies in the morgue.

All nikubaya (bad news), as one of the participants summarized. Yet all these people have the power and the energy to confront their own traumas and subsequently share their experience and knowledge with their own communities. Their belief in the future is immense; their love for their homeland is endless. In the same week that left Kibaki and Raila disagreeing once again, this time on the completion of their coalition government, the real hope for Kenya could be found here, on grass roots level.