Safely Back in Nairobi

Many of you have written over the last few days asking how we’re doing amidst the chaos sparked by Kenya’s recent election. Thank you for thinking of us. We are fine. We spent the holidays in Austria with Stephanie’s family and chose to spend an extended layover in Doha, Qatar (where we were flying through) to wait out the initial post-election tumult. Now we are safely back in our apartment in Nairobi and have been able to stock up on food (the stores were running out of food earlier in the week), water and petrol.

Downtown Nairobi was eerily devoid of people and traffic for a Friday afternoon, but felt safe with a handful of vendors peddling goods and vehicles moving about (the picture above was taken at about 2:30 this afternoon around the same location as yesterday’s volatile showdown between protesters and the police). We didn’t even see a large presence of police and soldiers, as we expected. Hopefully things will start to calm down soon, but these are some deep-seeded divisions and the President's actions have been particularly egregious (the opposition doesn't exactly have clean hands either). The whole thing is so extremely sad. At the airport today, the immigration official looked up at the empty terminal behind us and said sadly, "people have stopped visiting our country." Tourists are camped out in the airport waiting for flights out and our flight in was only about a third full. Moving around Kenya is less safe than normal right now, but we are fine in our apartment complex which is in a safe and calm neighborhood.

Please think of the Kenyans; this is a very sad time for them as they see their country risk all that it has gained in the last few years. There is truly so much potential here and we hope dialogue begins soon to resolve the current tribal impasse.