Eden Grace’s Report from Kenya

    Subject:     Kenya update from the Graces
    Date:     January 3, 2008 4:59:36 AM EST
    Dear Friends,

Please pray for Kenya. Much of the country is in turmoil following last week’s contested presidential election. Many have been killed. Many more have been injured and their homes destroyed. The disruption appears to be worse than at any time since the country’s independence in the 1960s. Most Kenyans cherish democracy and find it hard to comprehend the turmoil that has followed the elections. We are safe, but many are not.

Here in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, most of the shops and businesses along the main road have been destroyed and looted. Many are now burned-out hulks, and looters are pulling metal for scrap out of what little structure remains. The transportation network has been
disrupted so many goods are no longer distributed. Queues are long to buy flour where people still can. Food and fuel are hard to come by. Cell phone air time has been sold out in Kisumu and elsewhere, so most people cannot even use their phones. There are also severe shortages in Uganda of fuel and other goods that reach that country through Kenya.

We had gone out of town for the election and following days to the Friends mission in Kaimosi, where things remain calm. With us were three visitors from the U.S.: Eden’s mother Lisa, sister Wendy and friend Chandra. Yesterday morning we returned to Kisumu. After a long queue at the airport we managed to secure three of the last four remaining seats for the day from Kisumu to Nairobi. Our visitors flew to Nairobi last evening and from there managed to board flights last night heading back to the U.S.

Last night plans were being made for most of the remaining Americans in Kisumu, including us, to leave this morning at 5am in a convoy with an armed escort to the Uganda boarder, to proceed to Jinja and stay there
until things are calmer in Kisumu. As we were packing to leave, plans changed six times during the night with the result that the trip was called off. We are presently in our house in the safest part of town. If things get less safe, we have an offer to stay a few blocks away in a high-security compound for U.S. government employees. We are not
worried for our own safety. The Embassy is sending someone tomorrow to hold a “town hall” meeting for all American citizens in Kisumu, which will hopefully be an opportunity to share ideas about safety in the days ahead. We feel blessed to be part of such a caring community in
Kisumu.

The opposition leader Raila Odinga–whom many believe rightly won the presidency but had it stolen through election fraud–has called for a large rally today in the nation’s capital Nairobi. The Kenyan police have declared it illegal and have promised to block it as they did an attempted rally earlier this week. We expect some sympathetic action to happen here in Kisumu, which is Raila’s home base of support.

We have secured adequate food (much of it purchased in the Kaimosi area.) We somehow managed to find an open gas station and got a full tank of diesel fuel yesterday on our arrival in Kisumu. We were able to get some cash from a bank yesterday with our ATM card. One of our guests purchased some Internet air time for us at the Nairobi airport last night before leaving and relayed the codes back to us, so we should have Internet connectivity for a while. If the U.S. citizens in Kisumu need to be evacuated, we expect to be included in those plans.
The Embassy is sending someone tomorrow to hold a “town hall” meeting for all American citizens in Kisumu, which will hopefully be an opportunity to share ideas about safety in the days ahead. We feel blessed to be part of such a caring community in Kisumu.

We are planning to leave shortly, to spend the day with our American friends in the high-security compound. Depending on how the day progresses, we may also stay there one or more nights. Please pray that Kenyans are not shooting Kenyans today in the country’s capital, and
that a spirit of peace may come to the rest of Kenya as well.

We appreciate your prayers and many email messages of concern and support. We’re sorry this is a generic reply to so many of your heart-felt personal messages, but we are trying to conserve our Internet connection in case we can’t get more air time. Please know that we are so heartened to hear from you all, and to know that you are thinking of us. We are not afraid, and hope you can replace worry with
prayer.

Love,
Jim, Eden, Isaiah and Jesse

Friends United Meeting’s Press Release on Kenya

FUM has posted a report on the situation in Kenya on its Web site.

 Here’s the link.

If you are getting information from your sources in Kenya and circulating it on the Internet, be mindful of the advice in the concluding paragraph of the report:

Friends, your prayers for Kenya are needed desperately. We hope you will invite many others to pray for peace, for a healthy dialogue between the warring parties, and for a quick end to this “sad and bloody new year for Kenya 2008” as John Muhanji says. However, please be careful in your communication that you do not put in details that might harm our staff or others involved in this wave of hatred and violence.

Kenya Update

John Muhanji was able to send another e-mail yesterday. The Graces, Richmonds, and Muhanjis are safe. John is busy organizing peaceful forms of recreation in his village. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of his message:

Friends when you see yourselves enjoying the peace you have now wherever you are praise God for everything. Because that can be taken from you in a twinkling of an eye as it happened here in Kenya. Peace is something that needs to be guarded with a lot of care from everybody in the world.

I do not feel clear to posting on the Internet further excerpts from his message given the volatility of the situation and the tribal nature of the conflict. There is a media blackout. No news is being broadcast in Kenya. The stories and blogs I’m reading do seem to be saying the same thing. Kenyans are stunned that this is happening to them. Comparisons to Rwanda are being made. And it looks like there’s some military activity going on on the Uganda-Kenya border.

Here is one of the most informative Kenyan blogs I’ve found, the Kenyan Pundit. It has links that will take you deeper into the story if you’re so led to follow to them.

John cautions that January 3 may be a particularly dangerous day because a demonstration in Nairobi is scheduled.

I can only repeat his request. Pray for Kenya.