During the past week, I visited a numbing place. I am finding that sometimes I am shocked to the extent that temporarily my ability to feel or think disappears and I just have to try to take everything in. This happened when I visited the Internally Displaced People (IDP) Camps here in Naivasha. There are still at least half a million people living in these camps across Kenya, having had homes and businesses destroyed and feeling for their lives. Many families lost loved ones in the process.
I have always quite enjoyed camping - but this is something entirely different. Many people have lost everything, other than what they could carry on their backs as they escaped. People are crammed into tents for as far the eye can see. I visited the temporary health centre, which is fortunately coping magnificently without many resources. They told me that last week a woman gave birth in the tent there. In fact, the Red Cross workers and those living in the camps demonstrated a real sense of resilience in order to cope with unworkable situations and keep fighting on.
I met lots of smiling children and saw the school within the campus, again in tents. They have few teachers and classes of hundreds with no desk, a lack of exercise books and writing implements - but the education co-ordinator said that they will keep persevering. I admire everything that they are doing. There is primary education on site, and some secondary school children have been placed in schools locally here, but there is a huge number of teenagers that might have been involved with vocational studies but now cannot afford it, cannot access it, and remain futile - stuck within a giant camp site without anything to do to occupy their time. There are available institutions nearby, but the fees, despite being small by our Western standards, make this positive step impossible.
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