Stories of madness

There’s a crescent moon outside with two stars above it. It looks like a smiley face…the sky is so clear at night here… the sun setting over the lake is quite a sight to see. The past few days have been so busy, crammed full with meetings. It's been productive -- we've done expectation setting, reviews and evaluations, defining the vision of the organisation -- it doesn't sound so spectacular I guess but it is all part of building the foundations which I hope will last for some time. Naivasha is like a mini desert. You walk through the town and the dust is so bad it's like wading through sand. It makes a person feel like showering three times a day just to get rid of the dust which seems to find its way into every cranny and crevice. I spent some time on Sunday catching up with friends -- the last time I was in Naivasha was back in January, three days before the post election violence hit the town. I realised today that the road which the Fuhomi office is on is a road that played host to scenes which were broadcast around the world on the news. I remember watching the BBC and seeing hundreds of men on that very road with machetes and sticks, outside a supermarket that I have used pretty much every day since I arrived. It is hard to imagine this happened less than a year ago. As I was talking to one of my friends she was telling me about a man we both know who had been helping some of those gangs in January, the gangs that were going from house to house burning and killing; helping them by telling them where people were hiding. I see this guy pretty much every day. He used to be in a home for former street boys.

My friends were telling me of some of the things they saw and the situations they went through. It is strange sitting across the room from somebody who you've known for years and years as they tell you calmly about how they saw people dragged out of their houses and attacked by mobs; as they tell you how they hid their friends and prayed for their lives as men with machetes gathered outside the gates and demanded they be let in to find those who were hiding. They tell you how one lady who is in an IDP camp got a phone call from a neighbour of hers from the area she had fled -- a phone call where he begged for forgiveness. Apparently he had seen six small children going to hide in toilet, a pit latrine. He went to that toilet and grabbed the children and pushed them down the hole, into the pit -- and then put a stone on top. All of the children died. I shuddered when I heard that story - these are the stories that don't make it onto the news and I'm sure there are many more similar to that. Those politicians who are scared of arrest warrants that will probably be issued by the International Criminal Court and who are saying there should be amnesty -- they have so much blood on their hands. This level of evil -- it's terrifying. It's terrifying to see how illogical and irrationally brutal human beings can become -- people who you think you know, people who you think could never be capable of carrying out such atrocities. I could never be a humanist… human beings can be the most terrifying things on this planet. There’s a verse in the Bible which talks of how God is high above human beings and how he is above our understanding. We cannot understand his ways. I'm so glad. It's comforting to know that there is someone higher than us… someone who is incapable of this kind of madness... someone who has a level of purity beyond the reach of human beings. It gives me hope.