IDP camp

"Clinic" at IDP camp, Hannah is on the Right

4-22-08; Where to begin. Today travelled to an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp.

The other night I was at the nurses station minding my own business when Hannah (a Kenyan nurse) started to lecture me about the plight of the Kenyan IDP’s. There have been various times in Kenya’s history where tribal clashes have taken place. The most recent occurred this past December after the elections, in which many Luo’s felt, as do many in the international community that Kibaki’s win in the election was rigged. Kibaki is Kikuyu. The Kikuyu’s are business savy and have dispersed throughout Kenya, where they have lived contentedly among various other tribes. The frustration over the recent elections led to other tribes evicting them from their houses, killing the men and raping the women. There is an estimated 600,000 IDP’s in Kenya (total population in Kenya 35,000,000). These people have now lost their home and land and are afraid to return to their villages as there is very little that the Kenyan government can or has done to protect them. Many end up in IDP camps. The one I am going to, at Hannah’s insistance has been in existence since a previous tribal clash in 1992. She says there is a group of American physicians and nurses who will be holding a clinic there, I hope to go and help.

We travel by Matatu, small van that holds 14 people. White people very rarely travel by Matatu in Kenya, they usually have their own car or take a taxi. Therefore I got a lot of stares while on the bus, especially from children. After about 90 minutes of travel, and wishing I had taken something for motion sickness, we arrive at the trail to the IDP camp. After trudging through the mud for about a mile we arrive at the camp…

Words and pictures cannot express the site that I was met with...even as I type these words I am overcome with emotion at the helplessness and hopelessness that abounds. We have arrived before the medical team so we walk through the camp that is a series of connected huts that are covered in ragged plastic that has been salvaged from some dump. The camp is on a hillside that is cleared in the forest. Around the periphery are the outhouses which reek of human waste. Some of these outhouses are located at the top of the hill, above the camp, so that when it rains, human excrement is washed down through the camp. We encounter a gentlemen who has was operated on previously at Kijabe Hospital. He is grateful and wishes to buy us a cup of boiled milk. It would be insulting to decline. We walk into the café (what amounts to a fort I would have built as a child), with its split tree benches, dirt floor and tarpelin roof, filled with smoke from the open fire where the tea and milk are boiled. We are served a cup of boiled milk, fresh from the cows that mill about outside (Hannah tells me later that she had asked them to boil it a second time).

Men from the camp begin to enter to see this oddity who has come. They impart to us their tales of sorrow. I continually have to bite my lip to keep from breaking into tears. I ponder the randomness of life. Why did my soul alight into a body in a loving middle-class family in a wealthy nation when it could just as easily been deposited in a body that is birthed into this squallor?

The physicians have arrived. We go to the make-shift clinic of tents. I introduce myself and they are gracious enough to allow me to assist. I see a variety of complaints, almost all have lost a loved one in the conflict, many of the women have been raped. Many have various forms of psycho-somatic complaints related to the trauma that they have suffered (headache, chest pain, abdominal pain). We treat symptomatically, there is no cure…

The day ends and I am able to leave this place of despair. I go home and take a shower, one of the luxuries that we take for granted...