Only hours after the election results were announced, a group of men came and started beating up Anne’s brother who was wearing a T-shirt sporting the name of the President’s party. Then they poured petrol over him and set him on fire. When the police intervened he was barely alive and he died in hospital shortly after. “’Go and don’t ever look back,’ they said to me. I took my children and fled Kibera,” says Anne.
Anne’s house was burned to the ground. The single mother of three who also looks after two of her nephews since her sister died of AIDS last year took the children and ran. The only thing she could take with her was her ID card. She now stays in Jamhuri Park with thousands of other displaced Kibera citizens and vows never to go back to where her house once stood. “I cannot stay with these people, they will kill me,” she says. Her brother’s body is still in the mortuary and Anne does not have the money to bury him.
The post election violence between political opponents in Kibera, the vast Nairobi slum where 700,000 people live, turned tribal and was immediately exploited by criminal gangs who went on a brutal rampage. The trail of destruction left more than 500 dead and thousands displaced. But its logic did not always follow ethnic lines. Right across from Anne sits Rose who was a tenant in a house of a Presidential supporter. Although from a different tribe she was chased away. “They stole everything in the house before we fled,” Rose says. When she returned she found two new locks on her house that is now occupied by somebody else.
Anne and Rose are members of ‘peer mothers’, HIV-positive mothers in an International Medical Corps income generating program on the outskirts of Kibera. They produce bead work that International Medical Corps markets for them, generating about $120 per month for every woman. In return they work as community educators, teach women and men about HIV/AIDS, TB, and how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. They meet every week and have become a strong support group for themselves and others.
Nineteen made it to the first meeting after the violence started. The women come from different tribes and ethnicities but all say that does not matter. Twelve have fled from Kibera, most were chased away by armed groups. All of them had property stolen and four had somebody injured in the family. And Anne, of course, saw her brother being killed.
Community relations have suffered and healing the wounds will take a long time. “All humanitarian workers have to be aware of this,” says Peter McOdida, International Medical Corps country director in Kenya. “Whatever we are going to do, we must include peacemaking among the different communities into our recovery programs.”
The ‘peer mothers’ are connected through the same disease and common problems they share during their meetings. Today, the talk was all about what they went through when Kibera turned into a battleground. Even though many are now staying outside of the slum, they want to continue doing their work as community educators. And they want to work with their beads. Most of them are single mothers. Having already lost weeks of income they need the money to get their lives back on track.
Only four raise their hand when asked if they will move back to Kibera and one woman says, “Yes I will go back, but only when this war is finished.”