Chaos in Kenya

Happy New Year. I hope your New Year’s Eve was as great as mine! (I attended The Flaming Lips concert at the Cox Center which was unconditionally, absolutely, magnificently fabulous.)

I know that many of you are wondering about the current unrest in Kenya. To understand what is happening, you have to consider both what appears to have been a thoroughly botched vote count process plus the just-below-the-surface tribal conflict in Kenya. You might like to read this Reuter's article: http://www.reuters.com/article/africaCrisis/idUSL02240330

As you probably know, President Kibaki is a member of the Kikuyu tribe. Note the article's reference to Meru where I have been working: “Many Kikuyus feel it was their tribe, along with the closely related Embu and Meru, who shed blood in the Mau Mau rebellion that helped win independence and therefore deserved the spoils of victory, not the Luos. They also place great emphasis on owning property and doing business.” That last sentence certainly describes the hardworking Mubichi family.

Also note this paragraph: “Ethnic flare-ups are common in Kenya, especially around elections. The worst incidents came in 1992 when some 1,500 died in tribally tinged land clashes in the Rift Valley region. Five years later, another 200 were killed, mainly in fighting in the resort town of Mombasa.”

(Sadly, I anticipated this violence as early as last spring which is why I didn’t schedule a mission trip to Meru, Kenya for this January.)

I hope you will join me in praying that this chaos will end SOON and that Kenya will soon be back to where they were before the election.