My recent trip to Kenya to visit the United Orphanage & Academy with Chris McAdoo and Rhonda O'Bannon of Old Presbyterian Meeting House was both more discouraging and more hope inducing than I had anticipated.

The discouraging part was the evidence of horrific violence in which stores, farms and homes predominantly of Kikuyus were fire bombed, and because adobe is not highly flammable, doors and windows were broken out with sledge hammers. We saw the church just outside of Eldoret where 19 women and children who had sought refuge there were burned to death by locking the doors from the outside and setting the building on fire. In all more than 1,200 had been killed and more than 300,000 rendered homeless. We saw 30,000 refugees camping out at the Eldoret Fairgrounds in United Nations supplied tents and 10,000 more in a refugee camp at Mount Elgon. At Burnt Forest we saw 6,000 people living in shacks cobbled together from tin roofing sheets and other salvage. While it appeared that these camps were receiving an adequate amount of ground grains for feeding, in all other respects the living conditions were bad and that was before the onset of the rainy season which will begin any day.
Although the power sharing agreement that was signed off on while we were there has brought the violence under control for now, it does not appear that it will do anything to get the people in the refugee camps to return home. First because most of them have no homes to return to, but even if they did they would not feel safe doing so. They do no trust the police to provide protection and the horror of neighbors that they had lived among for 50 years and considered friends turning on them with no compunction will not be soon forgotten. It will take a long time to rebuild any kind of trust and meanwhile the displaced will continue to live in refugee camps for the foreseeable future.
On the hopeful side the UO&A appears to hold more promise in its ministry of reconciliation than ever before. Because of its multi-ethnic approach to the intake of children and the hiring of staff and teachers the UO&A was afforded protection of local officials. None of the violence that swirled all around it impinged upon its campus. We found the children as joyful and loving as ever. And the Academy unlike many of the local public schools was able to open on January 14 for the 2008 school year, which it did providing education from Early Childhood Development through Fifth Grade for the children in the residential facility and from the neighborhood whose parents could afford to pay $100 a year tuition and lunch fees. Construction was proceeding on the three story permanent stone Academy building, with the first floor almost complete. In fact the Fifth Grade class was meeting in one of the four classrooms on the first floor.
The most hopeful thing to come out of our visit was the decision we made that scholarships should be awarded by a board consisting of a representative from each of the seven tribes that inhabit the area to insure fairness and that all will be represented among the students at the Academy. We believe that such an approach will not only improve the chances of the UO&A surviving any future violence, but also will serve as a model to the community of ethnic diversity and harmony - the very things that are necessary for Kenya to move into the future. To this end we are seeking as many scholarships at $100 per child per year as possible. So far this year we have 14 scholarships pledged.