This Is Kenya, These Are Her Children

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Sugoi-Munsingen Children’s Home and School is a refuge for children with no where else to go in Kenya. This weekend that refuge was attacked. 130 children now have no home because of political unrest.

A soccer game had ended a few hours before attackers came armed with spears, machetes, bows and arrows. The building that had been a home for 130 troubled Kenyan children was looted and burned.

This is the new Kenya. A land where in a little over a month a thousand people have died because of political unrest.

The Sugoi-Munsingen Children’s Home and School was filled with children who had lived on the street. They survived the drug use and beatings that come to “invisible” children, the ones that have no home, no parents to run to. It was their refuge, their haven in a scary world. It can no longer take care of the them. Their home and safety have vanished.

As one child put it who understands being beaten, he bares the scars of one beating by his uncle’s hand;

“like I had another beating.”

It was believed that the school was owned by the Kikuyus. That was a false belief but it is the motive of those who attacked Headmaster Samuel Rutto’s school. A knife tried to stab him in front of his terrified students on Saturday. A miracle though took place on this horrific event, Rutto was left unharmed as the blade slid on his coat down his side instead of sticking into his heart.

On Sunday the damage was horrible. Everything is gone. Papers are charred, the corn that had been stored to feed the young that live there was still burning, clothes, cell phones, the very glasses that had rested on Rutto’s face stolen.

Attackers didn’t just attack the children of the Kikuyu tribe. All tribes were represented in the walls that housed these children, the home was run by the Presbyterian church. It did not look at the tribe a child was, just at the child who needed a bed to sleep in, a place to be safe.

“We have here Kalenjins, Luos, Kikuyus, Kisiis,” Rutto said, naming a few of Kenya’s ethnic groups. “But here they are all children.”

Since the attack the children’s new refuge is a hall in a Presbyterian church. The school will be rebuilt but not in the same location.

This is Kenya.

These are her children.

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