Nairobi is eerily quiet at present, in the interregnum between election voting and release of the final results. Usually gridlocked roads are deserted. Many expats have left for a brief holiday. People are lying low. Very few matatus are running. Local shops are opening late - shopkeepers are only leaving home after they have done their due diligence phone calls with friends in other areas:
'Its calm here, is it calm where you are? Right then, lets go.'
And they're shutting early. SecondBorn's school is one of the few which is open, and yesterday he was one of only six children in his class. As a friend said: 'The country is holding its breath.' For in the last elections in 2007 it was after release of the disputed results that the violence erupted.
I wasn't here then, though Tom was. He had flown in for a routine visit to this city he knows so well, and had ended up interviewing highly distressed people in emergency IDP camps in the area in which he'd spent his twenties. I remember his shaken voice down the phoneline as he called from a hotel lobby surrounded, not by tourists and business travellers, but by the middleclasses fleeing to more secure areas with their grabbags. The sense of a known, loved, safe world turned upside-down.
Stories have power. The quiet stories from my mainly privileged friends, and from my far more precarious students, of that time and others, have, I realised shaped my understanding and reality. I wasn't there then. But I have a sense, at one remove, of the then reality for many who were. And it makes me shaky, jangly, though I hope, pray and believe - with the rest of the country - that this time things will be different. But like on the anniversary of a bereavement, those stories and memories are alongside us, are concretely there with many of us.
Sitting on the grass of the school playground a fortnight ago with friends who were here then, they admitted they were feeling headachy, shaky, unsettled, queasy, out of sorts. One described realising in 2007 that all the surrounding families had left the rural area in which she lived, that she and her son had been left behind. Described hefting her backpack, taking her six year old son, and striking out into the bush on foot. Another described realising things were spiraling out of control in her up-country area. Visiting her local police station, to which 300 distressed people had fled in hope of security. And of returning in the afternoon with food and cooking pots, to discover the crowd had now grown to 2000.
There's a split too I think between those who believe that basically, deep down, whatever happens, they personally will be safe. Who have guards at the gate and some spare resources. Or those for whom, in their young lives, this has already been proven not to be the case. Helping my students with their reflective essays for their US college applications, we often have to sift through their memories of that time before we locate those stories which best show the small individual slice of life which sums up who they are in the world, as an actor, someone who has impact, a potential college scholarship holder. Understandably, these big traumatic memories of that time overshadow the rest.
A girl told of a terrified knock on her family's door. Of her friend from a minority tribe begging to be taken in, - her house was in flames. Of persuading her parents that despite the risk they had to do this.
Another student, an orphan, who'd been brought up by his three years elder brother, describing the anguish with which he discovered that the brother had been shot dead in rioting when out shopping for food for the family's meal.
A third student, also orphaned, who with his younger siblings lived left alone amidst the carnage, until an Elder from his parents' former church came to get them, to take them into his home.
An elderly Quaker woman in the local meeting describing how she'd managed to stop the mob from torching her house.
A girl describing fleeing with her family to her primary school which she'd left three years earlier. Of camping out there for six weeks with other families, of trying to distract and comfort scared children as the mothers took their lives into their hands to search ever further for firewood to cook the little food there was.
The sense that, for some, this has been a pattern in their life. My student from Molo, a hotspot area, who was born in an IDP camp during a cholera outbreak, and who has been displaced back there each election season of his lifetime, his father dying there of a heart attack last time. 300,000 people were displaced then. 100,000 still live in camps. Over a thousand were killed. Small wonder it darkens the landscape.
Some twenty plus years ago I spent time in Bosnia for an NGO in the month after the Dayton Peace Accord. We visited courageous individuals and micro-NGOs to see what support and funding we might offer. A really vivid memory is of Viva Jene, local women therapists and counsellors, who were working with the thousands of women who had suffered mass, ongoing, gang-rapes as their husbands and sons had been separated from them and, they feared, killed. Then - and for some fifteen and more years afterwards - the women had no proof of what had happened to their 8000 menfolk and boys. They were desperate, lobbying, requesting, beseeching - hoping, as you would, for the slightest slither of hope. That they might yet be alive, interned somewhere. As the therapist took me through the packed waiting room, showed me the bleak, desolate paintings done in art therapy, she said wearily:
'For some, the war is over. For we, who try to support our clients, we relive those experiences and the terror everyday.'
Watching the silent, solemn, endlessly patient queues of voters on Monday I was struck by the atmosphere. Our guard got to the polling station at 4am, two hours before its dawn opening, and waited in line till 330 pm, before he could cast his vote. He then came to work to relieve his mate, so that he could go and vote. Queues to the School Lane polling station near our home were at least 1.5 km long only two hours into the day. And yet people queued in the 30 degrees heat, and waited, to have their say. What commitment. But the atmosphere was unusual for Kenya, for anywhere. Solemn, resolute, determined. Silent queuing. The atmosphere of waiting outside Finals exams, nervy, apprehensive, but conscious that this really matters.
So we wait. So many Kenyan friends seem clear that the country wouldn't let unrest happen again. But the stories and memories are there, swilling around, unvoiced though they may be. Its an uneasy peace and a queasy feeling in the stomach, inviting those stories to sit down at the table with us, while we wait.
'Its calm here, is it calm where you are? Right then, lets go.'
And they're shutting early. SecondBorn's school is one of the few which is open, and yesterday he was one of only six children in his class. As a friend said: 'The country is holding its breath.' For in the last elections in 2007 it was after release of the disputed results that the violence erupted.
I wasn't here then, though Tom was. He had flown in for a routine visit to this city he knows so well, and had ended up interviewing highly distressed people in emergency IDP camps in the area in which he'd spent his twenties. I remember his shaken voice down the phoneline as he called from a hotel lobby surrounded, not by tourists and business travellers, but by the middleclasses fleeing to more secure areas with their grabbags. The sense of a known, loved, safe world turned upside-down.
Stories have power. The quiet stories from my mainly privileged friends, and from my far more precarious students, of that time and others, have, I realised shaped my understanding and reality. I wasn't there then. But I have a sense, at one remove, of the then reality for many who were. And it makes me shaky, jangly, though I hope, pray and believe - with the rest of the country - that this time things will be different. But like on the anniversary of a bereavement, those stories and memories are alongside us, are concretely there with many of us.
Sitting on the grass of the school playground a fortnight ago with friends who were here then, they admitted they were feeling headachy, shaky, unsettled, queasy, out of sorts. One described realising in 2007 that all the surrounding families had left the rural area in which she lived, that she and her son had been left behind. Described hefting her backpack, taking her six year old son, and striking out into the bush on foot. Another described realising things were spiraling out of control in her up-country area. Visiting her local police station, to which 300 distressed people had fled in hope of security. And of returning in the afternoon with food and cooking pots, to discover the crowd had now grown to 2000.
There's a split too I think between those who believe that basically, deep down, whatever happens, they personally will be safe. Who have guards at the gate and some spare resources. Or those for whom, in their young lives, this has already been proven not to be the case. Helping my students with their reflective essays for their US college applications, we often have to sift through their memories of that time before we locate those stories which best show the small individual slice of life which sums up who they are in the world, as an actor, someone who has impact, a potential college scholarship holder. Understandably, these big traumatic memories of that time overshadow the rest.
A girl told of a terrified knock on her family's door. Of her friend from a minority tribe begging to be taken in, - her house was in flames. Of persuading her parents that despite the risk they had to do this.
Another student, an orphan, who'd been brought up by his three years elder brother, describing the anguish with which he discovered that the brother had been shot dead in rioting when out shopping for food for the family's meal.
A third student, also orphaned, who with his younger siblings lived left alone amidst the carnage, until an Elder from his parents' former church came to get them, to take them into his home.
An elderly Quaker woman in the local meeting describing how she'd managed to stop the mob from torching her house.
A girl describing fleeing with her family to her primary school which she'd left three years earlier. Of camping out there for six weeks with other families, of trying to distract and comfort scared children as the mothers took their lives into their hands to search ever further for firewood to cook the little food there was.
The sense that, for some, this has been a pattern in their life. My student from Molo, a hotspot area, who was born in an IDP camp during a cholera outbreak, and who has been displaced back there each election season of his lifetime, his father dying there of a heart attack last time. 300,000 people were displaced then. 100,000 still live in camps. Over a thousand were killed. Small wonder it darkens the landscape.
Some twenty plus years ago I spent time in Bosnia for an NGO in the month after the Dayton Peace Accord. We visited courageous individuals and micro-NGOs to see what support and funding we might offer. A really vivid memory is of Viva Jene, local women therapists and counsellors, who were working with the thousands of women who had suffered mass, ongoing, gang-rapes as their husbands and sons had been separated from them and, they feared, killed. Then - and for some fifteen and more years afterwards - the women had no proof of what had happened to their 8000 menfolk and boys. They were desperate, lobbying, requesting, beseeching - hoping, as you would, for the slightest slither of hope. That they might yet be alive, interned somewhere. As the therapist took me through the packed waiting room, showed me the bleak, desolate paintings done in art therapy, she said wearily:
'For some, the war is over. For we, who try to support our clients, we relive those experiences and the terror everyday.'
Watching the silent, solemn, endlessly patient queues of voters on Monday I was struck by the atmosphere. Our guard got to the polling station at 4am, two hours before its dawn opening, and waited in line till 330 pm, before he could cast his vote. He then came to work to relieve his mate, so that he could go and vote. Queues to the School Lane polling station near our home were at least 1.5 km long only two hours into the day. And yet people queued in the 30 degrees heat, and waited, to have their say. What commitment. But the atmosphere was unusual for Kenya, for anywhere. Solemn, resolute, determined. Silent queuing. The atmosphere of waiting outside Finals exams, nervy, apprehensive, but conscious that this really matters.
So we wait. So many Kenyan friends seem clear that the country wouldn't let unrest happen again. But the stories and memories are there, swilling around, unvoiced though they may be. Its an uneasy peace and a queasy feeling in the stomach, inviting those stories to sit down at the table with us, while we wait.
