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Report #8b:
January 4, 2008

This is my second report for today. The radio is saying that 355 people have died and
150,000 have been displaced in Kenya since the election on Dec 27. I think this is a gross
underestimate, as I will indicate below. The radio also reports that things are calming
down. While this may be true in Nairobi and the other cities, it is not the case here in the
countryside, as again I will indicate below.

At 5:00 pm, Gladys and I went on my usual walk around town. Naturally we stopped by
the school where the displaced people have moved, as I mentioned in my email earlier
today. When we went in, we noticed that there were eight Red Cross personnel.
Fortunately, we had met Herman, the Red Cross leader, previously -- in better times. So
he was willing to be quite open with us and consequently the other Red Cross workers
were open as well. Here is what we learned.

I really am a bad estimator. I thought there might be a few hundred displaced persons.
No, there are 2,506 at the school. There are a total of seven camps in the district. The
one in Turbo (a hard-hit town near us) has 15,000 at the police station. Another camp has
5,000, another 4,000, another 2000, and then a few with only hundreds. This totals over
30,000 people and this is only one district; and not a particularly hard hit district as many
in the Rift Valley are. So the total of 150,000 for the country must be an underestimate. I
figure there are about 200,000 people in the district so this means that 15% of the
population is displaced.

I asked what the people would do when things calmed down. Would they go back to their
homes or return to Nairobi and Central Province? The answer was that they had nowhere
to go back to since they were born in Lugari District and had lived there their whole lives.
Many had moved to Lugari District during the colonial period to work on the farms of the
British settlers.

The population in the camps had divided up according to the place they came from. One
section was for the men and the other for the women and children. There are about 25
classrooms in the school so this means each classroom will have about 100 people in it.
There are a lot of children. I was also told that people are still coming in and that there
are many still in the countryside who had not yet reached the camps. I also learned that
some were not Kikuyu; if you are married to a Kikuyu (husband or wife), you would also
be targeted. Gladys and the Red Cross workers pointed out some of the Luhya in the
camp.

The Red Cross has not sent any assistance yet and there was a shortage of food in the
camp. A large truck drove up while we were there with many bags of maize. We were
told that someone had gotten these from his storehouse. But we were also told of one man
who had over 100 bags of maize burned (along, of course, with his house). Most of the
people had run away with just what they were wearing and had lost everything; so, there
is even a shortage of clothing, cooking and eating utensils. Some children have been
separated from their parents and one thing the Red Cross is doing is trying to reunite the
children with their parents--in the meantime the children are being assigned to a new
" family" to look after them.

They reported that there are cases of cholera which means unhygienic conditions. There
were definitely not an adequate number of latrines at the police station. The school had a
large number, although I'm not sure if they will be adequate, particularly in the long run.

One of the issues for the Red Cross workers is that they didn't know how long this would
last--would the situation be resolved in a day or two, a week or more, a month or even
longer? It is therefore difficult to plan. I wonder, even after the situation has calmed
down, how long will it take for people to return to their homes. Herman, the Red Cross
leader, said that they would return home because a home can be rebuilt. But how long
will that take and will people have the resources to do this?

We then went to the hospital to see Festus Ngetich, the medical officer in charge, who we
knew from the time when my mother-in-law was sick. He was not in. The women's ward,
which had only a few people when my mother-in-law was sick, was now completely
filled. As we were walking back to our house, the big transit goods truck parked at the
police station slowly drove by on its way to Malaba and Uganda. I wondered why they
waited until dusk to leave.

We then met Festus (medical officer in charge) on the road. Yes, there were cases of
cholera, but they were not too bad, but he expected them to get worse as time went on.
He was working day and night. He had no blood supply so he was sending wounded
patients in need of blood to Webuye, a town about 30 minutes away with a better
hospital. The ambulance, he said, was going back and forth day and night, but what
would happen when the tank of petrol (gas) was finished? This implied that people who
needed a transfusion would the not survive. On Sunday night there were many wounded
at the hospital--some died, but he said, "There were many wounded people last night
also" clearly indicating that the fighting was still going on in the countryside. He pointed
in a northeast direction to illustrate where many of the wounded came from. He was
clearly weary, doing as best he could in the circumstances, and as befuddled as everyone
else as to how this could happen.

Gladys bought some tomatoes and a half kilo of beef as we walked the last block to our
house.

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