KENYA SERIES: Kenya’s small towns slower to recover

The news of Kenya’s strife plastered the pages of U.S. newspapers during the height of the political violence in the country. Now, there is an occasional article about the country in the national/world sections, but this doesn’t mean all is well in Kenya.

While violence has slowed in the country’s big cities, the surge of pain inflicted within its borders, while just a memory to most Americans, is not easily forgotten to residents of the East African nation.

News Sentinel reporter Lola Alapo, a native of Nigeria, said there is a “relative calm,” as the BBC reported, in highly populated areas. Alapo went to Kenya for a mission trip a few months ago to see how she could aid in the recovery process.

“The violence is not as wide spread as it was in December, January and February,” Alapo said. “When you go in Nairobi and in the bigger towns and cities, the violence is pretty much abated.”

It’s the smaller towns that took the biggest hit. In Nairobi, people are resettling, but outside the city, people of the rural areas are displaced having escaped from their homes during the election turmoil.

“A lot of folks are still afraid to move around, because there’s still a fear of being attacked and attacks are still going on,” she said. “In the smaller pockets, people are still being attacked from time to time.”

The reporter visited Malo, a small town in the Rift Valley, after making a stop in the much larger city of Nakuru. Malo didn’t turn out to be a place to take a midnight walk. Alapo stayed with a family in Malo who was fortunate enough to be able to afford protection from the violence that still remains.

“The family that I stayed with, the father, he has three armed soldiers living on his property, and that’s why his stuff didn’t get burned. But before he took me anywhere, he had the guards go with us,” she said. “Because of what’s going on in that town now, a lot of the people can’t move around freely, because, if you’re of the wrong tribe and someone of different tribe catches you, then they beat you up.”

But, no longer are people of these small towns being met with bullets when they wake up in the morning, which is an improvement in recent times.

Alapo said there’s no reason to fault the U.S. media for turning their attention to other matters. There is much violence in the world, so Kenya couldn’t have remained in the spotlight.

“There’s so much strife going on in the world,” she said. “We’re trying to grab everything, you know, understand what all is going on around the world, so you can’t always just focus on one part of the world.”

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