I spoke with Dennis Kimambo +254 722 388 275. He is in Nakuru and today is better there. He learned that he has indeed been invited to Zambia for a ten day course on training how to monitor NGO programs. He leaves from Nairobi on February 4th and he will get there by a roundabout means.

Dennis asks Collins Odour +254 721 637 457 to lead our Pyramid of Peace http://www.pyramidofpeace.net activity in Nakuru while he is gone. Collins is also a member of their award-winning community theater http://www.repacted.org which engages audiences on the dramatic issues of our lives, such as AIDS and peace, and touches refugees and all who have been traumatized. Here below is Collins report from this morning, January 28, 2008.

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I have been out of communication because I hard no access to communication and basic needs at my place because of the skirmishes that rocked Nakuru town. I have also spent long nights talking on phone to a few Kikuyu youths in affected areas in Nakuru town and they have managed to stop killing but they have resolved to remove non Kikuyu in their residential houses. We are on the run every night we have to run like fugitives, I have been sleeping outside my house in the cold for the last four days talking to hungry youths ready to strike and kill in the name of ethnic cleansing, as a community theatre practitioner in the field of HIV and AIDS I am immune to the violence because of my popularity. Yesterday day night I spent three hours in the night cooling down heavily armed youths in Bondeni area in Nakuru. When the situation was out of place the police came in and fired several shorts in the air driving away the gang. All in all I continued staying out in the cold until morning because of the running battle between the police and the youth. I am very certain that from yesterday night talks they calmed down and go back to their normal chores.

Kenya is a country of a few millionaires and a million poor people. They say that your past shapes your future, there is no peace without justice and there is no justice without history. The political solution may not solve the problem because the conflict as taken an ethnic angle which is very historical, and the youth are not willing to give up the fight in the name of ethnic opium. But from the four nights I have spent out with the youth it is clear that social-economic situation of the youths must be improved by any means necessary.

I am taking care of a family of five who been flashed out of their houses and their property destroyed. though currently I am cut out of the small chores am used to, I can’t go to work at the Theatre do a play get some money buy food and airtime and because I am a community point person communicating all night long with people is becoming a problem yet the conflict resolution my take a little long to end with Naivasha now on fire I have been trying to reach out to a few young influential people in the are we have managed to talk to some young people about the dangers of ethnic violence hoping that something good will come out it at the end of the day today.

Public Domain, http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org