DanChurchAid
Kenya
ACT members address deeper challenges
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George Arende/CWS-KELC-ACT International
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| ACT member, Church World Service (CWS), through its implementing partner, the Kenya Evangelical Lutheran Church (KELC) supported displaced people from the Mathare slum with relief items including flour, cooking oil, vegetables, salt and female hygiene products |
By Stephen H Padre, ACT International
Such is the case in Kenya’s current situation, a political crisis that has created a humanitarian emergency. On one level, there are basic physical needs to be met for the more than 250,000 people who have been forced from their homes by the violence that has followed in the weeks since the disputed presidential election in late December 2007. But on a deeper level, there are also serious physical and psychosocial needs that require medical care and other responses.
Sellah Opiyo has been caught up in the violence in her home of Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. Situated in the extreme west of Kenya, on Lake Victoria, Kisumu is a stronghold of the country’s main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who says that he is the real winner of the presidential election over President Mwai Kibaki, who was declared the official winner. In Kisumu, the dispute over the election results devolved into some of the country’s worst unrest. Stores in the shopping areas have been looted and burned, scores of people have been killed, and thousands have been forced from their homes or have had their lives severely disrupted.
As an HIV-positive woman and caregiver for her family and others, Sellah cannot afford to have her life disrupted. To maintain her health, she needs to visit a nearby clinic regularly to receive anti-retroviral drugs and to eat a healthy diet in order for the drugs to be effective, requiring her to have a regular supply of nutritious food on hand.
On a recent Saturday morning, feeling it was relatively safe to go outside after being trapped for three days by the latest episode of violence, Sellah was also forced to venture out by a lack of food and to seek treatment for a severe headache. The city’s streets were calm, although burned-out trucks still stood in the middle of roads and the number of shoppers in the business areas was still way down.
Since revealing her HIV-positive status several years ago, she started an HIV support group that now includes around 100 members. Many of them, knowing her as a leader in the HIV-positive community, had been coming to Sellah’s house during the latest round of violence to ask for food.
But Sellah said they were all in the same dire situation with hardly anything to eat. "I gave the last bit of what I had in my house," she said, describing how several people a day came to her door. She turned many away. "The most painful ones [to turn away] are children," she added.
Upon leaving her house early in the morning, Sellah visited the district hospital for her headache. She was told she needed tests for malaria and other infectious diseases, but she didn’t have any money for them, so she moved on to address her other urgent need for food for herself and her family – her three children, ages 15 to 21, and the three children of her husband’s second wife. Her husband and his second wife both died in 1996.
Sellah decided to drop by the church where she is a member, which is situated on the grounds of the regional headquarters of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya (ELCK). ELCK is an implementing partner of Church World Service and other members of Action by Churches Together (ACT) International in Kenya.
From its compound, ELCK has been responding to the immediate needs of displaced people. Besides offering Sellah a bit of corn flour to get her through the next few days, ELCK staff have been distributing corn flour and rice to other neighbors in the city’s slum areas and in towns that have had their food supplies restricted by the violence. Before Sellah had arrived at the compound, a truck hauled away large sacks of corn flour for distribution through another ELCK facility in Kisii, about 80 km (50 miles) away. The truckload was enough to sustain more than 500 people for a week. Funding for this food distribution came from ACT member, Norwegian Church Aid.
Following the first phase of providing immediate relief, ACT members in Kenya are expanding their response as part of an US $4.5 million ACT appeal to address food needs as well as some of the deeper needs of affected people, such as trauma counseling, peace-building and reconciliation, and assisting those like Sellah who are HIV-positive.
While Sellah took a respite away from her house for a few hours and chatted with some ELCK staff, she was still feeling overwhelmed by the mounting and critical needs of her own and those close to her.
For her, "This is a government thing," she said, "but down here, I need food. The violence is beyond me. I don’t know how to talk about it. We need food first."
Stephen H. Padre is a freelance journalist working in Nairobi, Kenya and is writing on behalf of Church World Service (CWS).
DanChurchAid is a member of ACT International - a global alliance of churches and related agencies working to save lives and support communities in emergencies.
