On Tuesday 12 January, just at noon as the equatorial sun was beating down on our heads, we visited the settlement of Chigaze, near Mai Mahiu in the Rift Valley. This was one stop in a very busy day planned by our hosts for the day, the Water for Peace Project, which has an affiliation both with CRWRC and with Christian Community Services, a development initiative of the Anglican diocese of Mount Kenya South. A couple of men from the settlement met our bus on arrival and explained how this village of about 140 homes, neatly laid out along a couple of dirt roads, had come into existence on the hot and dry valley floor.Ethnic conflict has erupted many times over several decades in areas where the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, are a local minority. After the chaos that followed the December 2007 elections, Kikuyu families from a number of areas far to the north and west converged in the Nyemi area, between Nairobi and Mount Kenya, fearing that if they rebuilt the homes that had just been destroyed the cycle would only repeat itself once again. The Kenyan government gave each family a resettlement payment of Ksh 10,000 ($130), and the recipients said to each other, “If we eat this money it will be gone tomorrow, so let us put it together and see what we can accomplish.” Soon afterward the temporary camp where they were living was closed and they were forced to move again, with the help of an additional stipend of Ksh 15,000.
The leaders of the group arranged to purchase a large tract of land from private landowners near Mai Mahiu. That took most of the resettlement money; with the rest and with the materials provided by the government and donated by an NGO, each family gathered corner posts, sticks, rocks and mud for the walls, corrugated iron for roofing, and other building materials. Around each house, neatly fenced, is a shamba (farm plot) large enough to feed the family if carefully tended. Just a couple of years after they arrived, the houses are completed and the gardens are thriving.
Our next activity took us completely by surprise. “Please take a walk through our settlement, in groups of two or three, and wherever you see someone working in the shamba or doing laundry, please greet them. They will be happy to answer any questions that you may have about their lives and the community.” Susan, Chikka (our CRWRC "bridger") and I stopped to greet a young woman tending to her baby in front of her house, and she proved to be extremely reticent, perhaps unable to talk with us in English (or Swahili, with Chikka translating). But in a few minutes her mother-in-law arrived, a lively and gregarious woman of perhaps 70 (or 60? Or 50? it’s difficult to know) who was entirely comfortable speaking English and eager to tell us her story. Driven out of three homes near Eldoret in the past fifteen years, the last a five-bedroom wooden home that was burned down along with the rest of her village, she does not expect ever to return home. She lives now with her son, his wife, and their baby in a small but well-kept two-room mud-walled house. Life is much better here, she said, because at last she feels secure.
There is no primary school in Chigaze, but there is one a few km away that the children attend. Every plot is carefully planted in a variety of food crops, but no one in the settlement has found employment outside it, so there’s very little cash coming in. We heard a sobering object lesson, too, about how donor-driven development can go astray. A Canadian NGO, having learned that the new village has no water source, drilled a borehole to a depth that would ensure year-round water and installed a pump and several large storage tanks. In completing the project, however, they did not take into account the unusual local conditions: because of nearby geological activity—harnessed in geothermal turbines not far away to produce 30% of Kenya’s electrical power—the water deep underground is very hot. The water pump that was installed failed after a few months, because it was not designed for such conditions. But by that time the NGO had packed up its bags, taken its photos and written its reports on a successful project, and gone home. The residents of Chigaze cannot obtain replacement parts, and they lack the money to remove the broken pump and install one suited to their situation. So they must buy all of their water from tanker trucks.
