Some of you know from previous posts that my daughter serving our nation as a member of the Peace Corps, stationed in Kenya. You may also be aware, if you have paid any attention to the news in the past few days, that elections in Kenya, and the transfer of power, do not proceed as smoothly in Kenya as they do in the U.S. The events of the past few days have been anticipated for as long as my daughter has been in Kenya, about 18 months now. Some of you have communicated to me at various times that you think about my daughter, and so for those of you who may be concerned, here's an update.
As I said, this was not unexpected. Partly because of the Christmas holiday, and partly so that they would not be alone if things did get...well, the way they are, my daughter and two of her friends spent Christmas together. The election took place on the 27th. Monday morning, after seeing news reports and reading others online, I phoned my daughter to see how things were going. She stated that the violence was not at that point to close to them, but that the Peace Corps was trying to make arrangements for them to be picked up and brought to Nairobi. There was no petrol available in the community they were in, and the roads were blocked in place with checkpoints. Monday night/Tuesday morning the gunfire got to within a kilometer of them. They were able to hire a car to take them to where the Peace Corps vehicle would pick them up. Two men from the community went with them, to get them through the checkpoints. Much of the trouble is based on tribal affiliation. My daughter is a blue-eyed blond, but one of her friends immigrated to the U.S. from India (the Kenyans are familiar with people from India, and this was not a problem), and the other is African-American, and has the skin coloring associated in Kenya with the opposition tribe. At the checkpoint the men from the community
explained that all three women were from America, and they were able to get through.
When we spoke with her on Tuesday, about 11:00 AM our time, so 8:00 PM there, they were in a house in a gated community, with a four foot wall and a ten foot barb wire fence on top of that, with security, and more security at the gate to the house, with a third gate to the entrance to the upstairs of the house with the bedrooms. Wednesday they were expecting to be transferred to a home the Peace Corps owns, where a staff person had been living until just a few days ago. He went back to the states. Some of the Peace Corps Workers are already there. Normally when they come to Nairobi they stay near the City Centre, but that area is expected to be the focus of violence on Wednesday/Thursday. They are also being housed where they are, so that if the decision is made to evacuate them they will be closer to the airport.
Kenya has made some great advances in the past few years. My daughter has said she wouldn't mind staying in Kenya after her term is up (at least before these events), because the cities offer anything you can find in any large city in the world. But the country also has a huge disparity in wealth between the cities and the rural areas, and even the cities are home to huge slums. Kenya has a tremendous problem with corruption.
News accounts state that thousands of tourists are stranded in Kenya, some I am sure who were there for the Safari trips, and many more on the coast, especially in the Mombasa area (where my daughter and her friends had hoped to meet other PCW's to celebrate the New Year as they did last year. While there had been hope that there would not be the kind of upheaval they are now experiencing, as I said previously, it was not really unexpected. Probably the severity was not anticipated. My daughter had told us when she first got there that if we were able to come while she was there, we did not want to come at this time.
We are able to keep in contact with our daughter. She has a cell phone. However, if she needs to contact us she makes a quick call just to tell us to call her back. The phone service is a pay as you go system, and they are not allowing users to buy more minutes so that people cannot communicate. So she is conserving the minutes she has. She is not charged for incoming calls. Live broadcasts were banned soon after the elections, and most of the information she has of what is going on comes from friends and family outside of Kenya who are calling or texting her.
BTW, Happy New Year.
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