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Peter Vigneron, in Kenya for the next few months on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation, sent us this dispatch. It’s a thoughtful, well-informed look at some of the historical factors behind the recent troubles in Kenya, and how those historical antecedents are likely to continue to affect attempts at political reunification.

In Kenya, the coalition government survives day to day. Last Friday, Vice President Kalonzo Musoka just nearly fooled Prime Minister Raila Odinga into speaking first at a peace rally, suggesting that Odinga should introduce Musoka and President Mwai Kibaki as his superiors. Constitutionally, Odinga and Kibaki are supposed to be equals. As Vice President, Musoka’s role in government is to assume presidential duties if the real president dies, and then only for 90 days until an emergency election can be held. His status is so clearly and indisputably inferior to Odinga’s that the controversy might be amusing if it had not headlined the nightly news each evening this weekend. As such, it strikes a sadly Orwellian chord to this Western observer.

Meanwhile, 150,000 Kenyans languish in refugee camps–and for some, “languish” is probably the wrong word. Non-refugees have been found sneaking into the camps, people looking for government handouts and lured by rumors of impending land grants to refugees. Stories have circulated of families selling their property and heading to the camps to get in line for those grants. So maybe 149,000 people are languishing in refugee camps, and the rest are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of land to Kenyans in Rift Valley and Central Provinces. “As agriculturalists,” anthropologist and rebel leader Jomo Kenyatta wrote of his Kikuyu tribesmen in the 1930s, “the Gikuyu people depend entirely on the land. It supplies them with the material needs of life, through which spiritual and mental contentment is achieved…The Gikuyu consider the earth as the ‘mother’ of the tribe[.]” A Kalenjin would almost certainly say the same. Kikuyus and Kalenjins are farmers, as Kenyatta notes, and so depend almost exclusively on what their farms produce. A family without land does not eat, does not live.

This is why, like many famous ethnic conflicts in world history, Kenya’s post-election violence had very little to do with ethnicity. In the 1960s, after Kenyans fought and won their independence from British colonial rule, Kenyatta, now recast as the nation’s first president, awarded large plots of land in Rift Valley Province to his Kikuyu tribesmen, who bore the brunt of British oppression and savagery during the Mau Mau uprising, and who had suffered the greater indignity of losing their property to British settlers throughout the first half of the 20th century. It is unclear if Kenyatta believed he was righting historical wrongs or just bestowing patronage on his Kikuyu supporters, but he couldn’t have been surprised when the Kalenjin community reacted poorly to sharing their ancestral homes with new neighbors. In the 45 years that have followed independence, a low-grade land conflict has simmered in the Rift, and the post-election violence of January and February is the latest chapter.

It might be useful here to consider the use of the word “genocide,” which was bandied about at the height of the violence, especially after dozens of Kikuyus were burned to death while taking shelter in a church. In genocides, the object is generally murder. In Kenya this year, the object was land reclamation, which makes the killing that occurred ghoulishly purposeful, but not genocidal. It is perhaps for this reason that the number dead, usually estimated at around 1,200, is dwarfed by the number of Kikuyus initially pushed from their homes (over 300,000), and the number of those who still find it unsafe to return (150,000).

And in the midst of this conflict, now generations old, we find the current power-sharing debacle between Kibaki, a Kikuyu who brazenly tried to snatch December’s presidential election from his Luo challenger, Odinga. Luos, traditionally fishermen from Kisumu, have no particular affinity for land, and the Luo-Kikuyu violence was strictly borne of hatred for Kibaki and his abuse of the democratic process. Kalenjins have no particular affinity for Odinga, except that he opposed Kibaki and offered to decentralize the government, which many Kalenjins interpreted as their long-awaited opportunity to assume greater control of Rift Valley and drive their neighbors back to the ancestral Kikuyu land at the foothills of Mount Kenya, in Central Province. For the time being, Kibaki and Odinga are sharing executive power, but badly. Neither the hardliners in Kibaki’s camp, like Musoyka and Justice Minister Martha Karua, nor Odinga—a hardliner himself—will likely compromise well enough to run the government, which is already deeply corrupted and inefficient, and so it seems only a matter of time until the whole thing collapses once more.

And still—the refugees. Compounding the government’s ineptitude is a legitimately complicated and serious refugee crisis. For decades the only stable and peaceful nation in East Africa, Kenya has never had its own refugee problem, and Kenyans are rightly clamoring for a return to normalcy. The government is under enormous pressure to move the 150,000 displaced Kenyans out of tents and into permanent homes, but cannot decide where those homes should be. Parliamentarians from Rift Valley argue that most refugees shouldn’t return to the Rift, where the land conflict would be renewed, and yet haven’t offered a way to determine which Kikuyus were driven off land given to them illegally by Kenyatta and which were driven off land they purchased legitimately. Disallowing all Kikuyus from returning to their homes seems like a massive perversion of justice, but allowing them all to come back seems like a recipe for disaster, revisited. Worse, it certainly is not clear whether resettlement away from the Rift will do anything more than alienate a new generation of Kikuyus, who will feel that their land was stolen by the government, as the Kalenjins felt in 1963, and still feel today.

The government appears to have adopted a third solution, however. Over the past two months, construction crews have been feverishly building big police stations in the worst-affected areas, evidently hoping that the imposition of law and order will keep Kalenjin-Kikuyu tensions from re-igniting. It is not a particularly good solution. In some areas, the Kalenjins who died during the clashes were shot by police, not by Kikuyus, and there exists a hard-bitten distrust of the police in several North Rift communities. Worse still, land conflicts have a way of outlasting the original disputants, sometimes for thousands of years. Too often, an escalation in force by one side—and today Kalenjins do not believe the police to be impartial—triggers an escalation in violence.

On the other hand, any government’s first priority ought to be the safety and security of its citizens. Perhaps law and order could be an partial or interim solution to this decades-old conflict. In the long term, though, it is hard to be optimistic for a real peace: Kenya’s land dispute is not particularly different than any of the world’s other famous land disputes—in Palestine, Kashmir, the Balkans. Kenyatta should have known better.

In this final installment of our interview about the post-election violence in Kenya, Richard Kiplagat talks about the role of Kenyan runners in helping to reunify their country.

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Intro photos by Toby Tanser. Intro music by Nick+Gerald. Outro music by Amaryoni.

In this interview, Richard Kiplagat describes how his and his KIMbia teammates’ training was affected by Kenya’s post-election violence. Richard also speculates on how the violence will affect Kenyans’ performances during the spring and summer roadracing season. (The interview was recorded on April 7. Since then, it’s been confirmed that Stephen Kiogora will not run Boston on Monday, because of losing too much training time during the violence earlier this year.)

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Photos courtesy of Toby Tanser. Music by Nick+Gerald.

In Kenya for the next few months on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation, Peter Vigneron has a few thoughts about running in the Rift Valley.

I’m staying at Silgich Hill Academy now, where even the gardener is a better runner than I am.
On my morning run Sunday, as on many of my morning runs since I’ve come to Kenya, a group of children playing near the road fell in alongside me as I passed by. This morning one boy raced me, and he almost won. Before he dropped I was wondering how long I would last if he didn’t get tired very quickly. I realized when I finished that since my arrival to Kenya in early March, this boy, this nameless, anonymous child, is the first Kenyan who couldn’t hang with my pace. I don’t think he was older than 12.

There’s been a lot written about the successes of Kenyan runners over the last 15 years, some of it by very smart people. I may not have much to add to the discussion, except to say that I think there are a lot of reasons why Kenyans are so good and why they are so good in such numbers. I think that in Kenya there exists a perfect storm of reasons, that there are layers of explanations and some work for some athletes and don’t work for others. I’ve read that Kenyans are fast because all Kenyans run or walk miles to school everyday, and that no American will ever be able to match that type of childhood aerobic development. Then I read that Paul Tergat rode the bus as a kid.

One afternoon early in my trip Paul Koech pointed to a group of children playing soccer at a local school and told me that probably one of them could be a world record holder. “It’s just a matter of organization and encouragement,” he said, “the talent is here.” That talent isn’t in the United States or Europe, or even Uganda or Tanzania, Kenya’s neighbors to the North and West. In must exist to an extent in Ethiopia, a country that has produced the world’s two best male runners, but Ethiopia’s depth is not comparable to Kenya’s. The talent is very much right here, in Rift Valley Province. Paul was exaggerating about the children playing soccer. There cannot be a potential world record holder every 100 kids, as he boasted, but I’d believe it if that ratio always produced a runner who reached world class.

There are significant, identifiable reasons for Kenya’s sustained success at distance running, of course. In fact there is an abundance of identifiable reasons, and the stories about walking and running miles to school everyday have a lot of truth to them. The Rift Valley is where Kenya produces most of its corn, and like farm communities worldwide, population density here is low. A school might have to cast its net miles to find enough children to justify hiring teachers, and there are few cars and buses to carry children those miles to class. Not every Kenyan walks 10K to school everyday—there are buses at a lot of private schools, some kids cycle, and some must live next door, after all—but many do. Even so—children run and walk to school the world over. Kenya isn’t the only poor country with farmland.

Wednesday afternoon I found myself chatting with a young man called Sammy. He had seen me go for a run that morning from Silgich, and he wanted to know about my training. Sam is the gardener here. He came because he is an orphan, and after he completed 8th grade the family he lived with turned him out, reasoning that he was old enough to fend for himself. (Incidentally, he may have been. I’d say he’s 19 or 20, and class is a notoriously unreliable way of estimating age in Kenya. A lot of kids don’t finish high school until they’re 22 or 23.) Paul houses and feeds Sammy in return for his labor, and perhaps pays him a modest wage.

In the course of our conversation, I learned that Sammy is a marathoner. He runs every morning at 5:00 before going to work at the school all day. Last year, at 5000 feet, Sammy ran 2:25. He asked if I wanted to join him for training the next morning. For the most part, I’ve been guided by an “always say yes” policy since I came to Kenya. I reason that most of the worthwhile experiences here are going to make me a little bit uncomfortable, and most of the people I’m around are intelligent and unlikely to make me do something I cannot or should not do, so I said yes.

I’ve read that the Kenyan diet is they key to their success. I’ve read that it’s the altitude, and I’ve read that it’s because they lie down and sleep in the grass everyday between runs. I’ve read that it’s because they do so much mileage, that it’s because they run twice a day every day, or even that it’s because they run thrice a day everyday. A rowing coach I met in Colorado told me it was because they sprinted all their runs. He was certain that they didn’t do high volume. I’ve read that it’s because they are poor and desperate and view running as a way out of poverty. I’ve read that it’s drugs. I’ve read that it’s genetics, and that the rest of us should just forget about beating them.

I don’t know if any of this is true. Distance running is a greatly understudied activity. Part of the confusion here is probably because we don’t know empirically if a high-volume program gets better results than a low-volume one, for example. We have loads of anecdotal evidence for what works, but it’s tough to tease apart the components of success in this sport, even on what should be a basic question like mileage. It would be one hell of study that controlled for sleeping in the grass everyday.

When Sammy and I began running Thursday morning the moon was shining and I had a terrific view of the stars. We started at a jog. The footing was difficult in the dark, but starting slowly seems universal to Kenyan runners, regardless of conditions. The first half mile is never, ever, faster than 4 minutes. Each time I run with them I get artificially confident as I warm up, and then the pace drops and suddenly I find myself fighting for every stride, running the tangents, and wondering if today will be the day I don’t get dropped. On Thursday I made it 55 minutes before I called it a morning and waddled home to school. Sammy added another loop and still beat me back. On Friday I found that my achilles had tightened, and I took Saturday off. Sunday saw my glorious victory.

Sammy is the rule in Kenya, not the exception. On Thursday morning we passed 5 guys just like him, all wearing faded Nike gear from the early 1990’s, training in torn shoes, most wearing winter hats against the early morning cold. When the sun rose we could see Mount Elgon, the site of a month-old government counterinsurgency campaign against a violent rebel group, looming ethereally against the fading dawn of Western Kenya and Uganda.

At World Cross Country in Scotland last month, a guy nobody had ever heard of named Leonard Komon took second behind Kenenisa Bekele and ahead of 2007 champion Zerseny Tadesse. I don’t mean nobody in the West had heard of him (which is certainly true), I mean nobody anywhere. None of the athletes I’ve talked to recognized his name beyond seeing it on the roster for Worlds. The Sunday Standard reports that another athlete discovered him in 2005 training in jeans and leather shoes. He finished 3 seconds behind Bekele, the greatest distance runner in the history of the world.

I’m a betting man, and I bet altitude has a lot to do with Kenyan success. I bet poverty is a powerful motivator, I think their diet helps, and the type of training they do should be studied and replicated further. But I also think that being the best in the world at something means that everybody else is not as good, and I’m not certain that the Kenyan dominance can be easily distilled and copied.

What sort of work does the KIMbia Foundation do? It may be a cliche, but it’s true–making the world better by changing one life at a time. A lot of contributions to the foundation are devoted to paying secondary school fees for needy students. (In Kenya, primary education is free; annual fees for a secondary boarding school are approximately half of Kenya’s per capital income, and therefore out of reach for much of the population.)

Donors to the foundation who wish to support education are linked with a specific student. Here’s a letter our foundation’s Peter Vigneron sent to one such donor on behalf of Faith Kosgei, a sponsored student at Singore Girls School in Iten. To learn more about the foundation, including how to contribute, visit the foundation’s page elsewhere on our site.

James,

I’m writing to give you a quick update on your student, Faith Kosgei.

I met with Faith last week at Singore and had the opportunity to speak with her for a few minutes. I’ve also asked her to compose a letter to you, and I hope you’ll receive it within a few weeks. We’re collecting letters and then sending them to the United States with some of the KIMbia athletes traveling for spring races, so it’s a slow (but reliable) process.

I’ve already sent you some of Faith’s biographical information, but this time it’s straight from her, so if I’m repeating myself please forgive me. Faith is a form three student, and one of the smartest in her class. She put together a good record in primary school, and was asked to attend Singore after doing well on the national primary school exam. Singore is one of the best secondary schools in Kenya, so an invitation to attend is a big deal.

Faith, however, is one of six children, and her parents were concerned about tuition at Singore. They wanted her to attend the local day school, which is cheaper (no boarding fees) but like most day schools in Kenya, it is massively over crowded, and the quality of education is very, very low. Faith convinced her mother to take out a loan, and has been struggling to pay fees for the past two years. Last year she was unable to meet full tuition expenses, and would most likely have been sent home this year if not for your scholarship. Actually—your contribution covers her fees until graduation and the balance left unpaid from last year as well.

I’ve taken another picture of Faith and have attached it to this email.

Thanks James,

Peter Vigneron

Peter Vigneron is in Kenya for the next few months to work on Kimbia Foundation projects. Here’s his account of the Iten Peace Run, held last Saturday in Kenya’s unofficial running capital.

A little after 8am I arrived at the soccer field in Iten center, shepherded by Paul Koech and with 30 girls from Silgich Hill Academy following in two matatus. Already I was traveling with a former world champion, and presently I would meet another, then an Olympic gold medalist, then a reigning world champion at 800 meters. I snagged a picture of the man who holds the greatest record in track and field, and—true to form—he made an early exit from the scene. This was the start to my fourth day in Kenya, 74 hours into the trip.

Toby Tanser and Lornah Kiplagat have held a girls race in Iten since 2004. This year’s edition was scheduled for January 5th, but events intervened and the race did not proceed. On February 28, Kenya’s rival politicians signed a power sharing agreement that has brought a nervous peace to the country, and the event, which in normal circumstances promotes education and athletic achievement for young girls, was recast as a peace march and 4k cross country fun run. This year, it featured nearly every prominent Kenyan runner of the last four decades.

When the idea for a peace run was born, Kenyans had made precious few serious gestures toward peace and reconciliation nationwide. In fact there is still a disheartening shortage of such gestures, but the running community is beginning to make its voice heard. “Actions speak louder than words,” Olympic bronze medalist Mike Boit said after the race, “and we have told everyone that we want peace in Kenya.”

The elephant on the field Saturday afternoon was a report published by the International Crisis Group (ICG) February 21 that accused runners of funding and organizing some of the post-election violence in Rift Valley Province. It quoted sources who suggested that Kalenjin runners with military training helped to drive the Kikuyu supporters of Mwai Kibaki out of the Rift after the election, and were thusly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people and the widespread destruction of Kikuyu homes and shops.
These allegations came several weeks after several athletes received SMS text messages threatening violence against runners if they purchased abandoned Kikuyu land. The ICG paper reports that runners involved in the violence had “partly economic” motivations for supporting Kalenjin militias, and the SMS threats were probably intended to deter athletes from buying Kikuyu land at low cost. Moses Tanui, who owns several large commercial buildings in Eldoret, was also harassed by police, whom many Kalenjins say sided with the government against the opposition.
Tanser recruited nearly 600 girls from local primary schools for the race, and gave each a yellow t-shirt bearing the Shoe4Africa logo and the words “Run for Peace.” Tanser’s organization distributes running shoes to underprivileged Kenyan children, and each girl received a pair of sneakers at the finish line.
Each elite athlete was also asked to don a shirt, and so shortly after 10am, a parade of yellow clad runners—past, present, and future—marched through the small commercial center of Iten. 1988 Olympic silver medalist ‘87 world marathon champion Douglas Wakiihuri carried the Kenyan flag at the head of the parade with Luke Kibet, the reigning world marathon champion who was injured in the violence. Wakihuri is Kikuyu and Kibet Kalenjin.
The 31 page ICG report contains only one paragraph on athlete participation in the violence, but that paragraph has attracted worldwide media attention. An article on ForeignPolicy.com noted how disappointing it would be if athlete role models were responsible for or involved in violence. It is a concern that has deeply offended the Kenyan running community, who view themselves as the face Kenya shows to the world.
After the march, KIMbia athletes Chris Cheboiboch and Tim Cherigat led the girls through the two-lap 4k course. 14 year old Paskaline Kosgei took an early lead, running alongside Cheboibach for a solid victory over Chelimo Ng’etich and Gladys Cherop, who were paced by Cherigat. Kosgei won a Compaq laptop for her school, and Ng’etich and Cherop took home 12,000 and 8,000 Kenyan Shillings, respectively, or roughly $185 and $125 USD. All but a few girls racing went barefoot, and the scene at the finish was at times both chaotic and comical. Race organizers and staff rushed to hand out shoes but were quickly overwhelmed. At one point the queue for the finish grew to over 100 meters.
The athletes I’ve spoken with are furious that the paragraph implicating runners in the ICG report has been seized upon by the media. “It’s all political,” one told me. “It’s people taking advantage of the situation to tarnish big names in the running community. They see an opportunity and they take it.”
In Iten, business is back to usual. The hundreds of runners who normally train on the town’s famous red dirt roads have returned. KIMbia athletes Cheboiboch, Cherigat, James Kosgei and Mike Jeptoo put in a very good 25k effort on Wednesday, and Charles Kibiwott ran 2:08 at the Seoul International Marathon on Sunday. World Cross County is coming up. The athletes would like the violence, and now the accusations, behind them.

International athletes in attendance, Shoe4Africa Run For Peace:

• Daniel Komen
• Janet Jepkosgei (The Eldoret Express)
• Lornah Kiplagat
• Yobes Ondieki
• Joyce Chepchumba
• Amos Biwot
• Moses Tanui
• Luke Kibet
• Moses Kiptanui
• John Yuda
• Paul Koech
• Mike Boit
• Douglas Wakihuri
• Ezekiel Kembio
• Jephart Kimutei
• Ben Maiyo
• Matthew Birir
• Kimutei Kosgei
• John Litei
• Durka Mana
• Silvia Kibet
• James Kosgei
• Rebbie Koech
• Peter Tanui
• Christopher Koskei
• Paul Cherop
• Ben Kogo
• Rose Tatamuye
• Wilson Juma
• Jonah Birir
• Luke Kipkosgei

Paul Koech’s take on the sad situation in Kenya of the last few months. Paul is a captain in the Kenyan Army, and recently spent a year as part of a peacekeeping force in Darfur, only to return home and find senseless political violence occurring in his own country.

Hope this will find you and your family in a fine mode. We are coming to terms with what transpired in our country in the last two months. Although things are returning to normal, it is at a snail’s pace and suspicion and tension remain in several areas. We have high confidence with the results of the mediation team led by former UN Secretary General Koffi Anann. The team has a positive intention towards stability in our country. We hope that the government is ready for change, as they will be significantly affected.

The cause of this conflict actually is power greed, which is what most of our old guard leaders were brought up with and thus they believe that they can stay in power as long as they wish. That is, as long as they control the arm of security forces.

Those involved were surprised by what occurred after all their plans of rigging were exposed before the election actually took place. They had tried to use administrative elements to ensure victory, but then realized that many of these people were not on their side in several areas where they were not popular. They then decided to use Administration Police, whom, since President Kibaki took power in 2002, have been trained and equipped to support the government in case of any uncertain resistance by citizens to any government project. There is evidence that these police were sent to several polling centers, which were unfriendly to the government, with marked voting papers, with an intention of stashing them into the ballot boxes.

This plan failed when some of these very police passed the information to the opposition. The opposition leader went to the press and condemned the presence of police at the polling centers. Thus, this marked the end of government power in unfriendly areas, as any suspected police in civil or uniform were aggressively stopped.

With this plan aborted, they staged another scheme whereby they waited for the results from various regions and then altered the figures in favor of Mwai Kibaki. The alteration of these figures was noted and complaints were raised by returning officers, who had been in the poling station. They were then threatened and replaced and the specific forms used in placing results were changed and signed by the different officers. Also, the chairman of Electoral Commission was forced to announce the doctored results. He complied since, as it has been suggested, one of his tribesman was bound to be vice president and could eventually take over leadership after Kibaki’s term ends.

The act was not just vote rigging, but even more significantly, the stealing of Kenyan rights. The events from the time Kibaki was announced as the winner to swearing in was a clear indication that there was a scheme hatched prior to the election, for the normal ceremony protocol was not followed when the announcement of the winner took place. This immediately marked the beginning of the clashes on December 28.

It is also interesting to note that it took the Electoral Commission three days to announce the presidential election results, while the parliamentary results were announced immediately. In the party result, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM, led by Raila Odinga) had 99 members of parliament against 43 for Party of Nation Unity (PNU, led by Kibaki). Other small parties had 65. This indicates that Kibaki had the support of less than a quarter of the MPs. When ODM raised complaints of rigging in the specific areas, their pleas were ignored as the legal system appears to have favored the Kibaki and his government. If this continues, legal arguments against PNU will most likely take several years before it is deliberated or given a hearing.

The negotiating teams made considerable progress, and on February 28 the two leaders, Kibaki and Odinga, signed a power sharing agreement. The parliament was constituted on March 6 and will address needed changes to the Constitution to accommodate the signed agreement. The proposed changes designate that there shall be a president, who will be the head of state, and an executive prime minister, who will be the head of Government, with Kibaki and Raila taking the above positions, respectively. Although the general population accepts this compromise in a effort to save the country from breaking apart, in reality ODM followers are bitter about what occurred.

As a result of this controversial election, it may take Kenya ages to heal and to return to where we were. The most affected areas are the core ODM areas, where anger ruled over justice and common sense. People destroyed properties by fire and even hanged rival supporters who were living in the area. Destruction in some areas was not tribal, but rather as a result of political rivalry.

Our country is divided into eight regions, where Central Province is almost entirely Kikuyu. This is the largest tribe in Kenya and the tribe of Mwai Kibaki. The property in this area is owned almost exclusively by the Kikuyu. Kikuyus are also found in all the other regions and own many businesses and properties. The reason behind this dates back to colonial time, when the Central Province, in general, was not occupied by the whites, but the Kikuyu were used by the colonialist to fight other tribes and worked for them. By virtue of their close relationship, Kikuyus had early access to education and hence were able to prosper.

Thus after independence, the Kikuyu had an upper hand to succeed to most of the positions in the government. The government of our first president issued land to Kikuyu, through a settlement scheme, in the areas which were perceived to be for other tribes.This did not sit well with the other tribes, and as a result of resistance to this act, many were jailed and intimidated. People have been hiding their anger for the last 40 years, only to resurface by the election dispute.

Despite all of this, I remain optimistic and I hope that we have learned some positive lessons from this conflict. It is clear that the greed and selfishness of a few can negatively effect the lives of many. I hope that this is a lesson that we do not forget.

I feel that we should be especially indebted to Kofi Annan and to President Bush and Secretary Rice for their efforts to see us through this turbulence of greed.

Paul Koech (26:36 10,000m, 2:07:07 marathon) sent us this report from Kenya on Wednesday, one day before the leaders of the country’s rival political parties signed a power-sharing agreement. A captain in the Kenyan Army, Koech founded Silgich Hill Academy in 2004. The school provides free primary education for more than 150 students.

We are fine, although with some tension in relation to the security state of the country. Silgich Academy is going on well, although most of the parents were affected by the violence after the disputed election results of two months ago. All of the school staff are safe and well, but some students transferred, for their parents feared that the situation in the country would deteriorate into an out-of-control ethnicity-based conflict.

There is only one student, Kenneth Ngetich, whose father was shot by police along Eldoret-Nairobi road while he was walking to the shopping center. The boy is among the students sponsored by Mr D’s class [at a Massachusetts elementary school]. I will send you his picture and some of the pictures of the affected area.

The main problem we are facing is the feeding of persons who ran away from the clash-torn areas, and payment of school fees for parents who are mainly farmers and were not able to sell their produce or had it destroyed. We are struggling to sustain ourselves with the little we have. Our neighboring academy was closed, for they did not have the resources to continue.

The closest area to Silgich that was affected is 6 kilometers from here, a shopping center where houses and shops were burned and destroyed, for it was said that these were people who supported the government. The effect in Eldoret is substantial in areas outside the town. All parts of the country, except Central and Eastern provinces, had a considerable share of destruction of properties due to anger of the ODM’s [the opposition party led by Raila Odinga] supporters and sympathizers.

Despite all of these problems we are optimistic for the future. I know that as athletes, we always considered ourselves to be one Kenya. I have confidence that in the end we will again return to the state where we are all proud to be Kenyans.

Not sure why Nike chose this week to highlight Michelle Sikes (she hasn’t raced since the Falmouth Mile last August), but she is their Athlete of the Week. Our favorite part? Read her answer to, “What do you do to relax away from the track?”

Sikes will be running the US Indoor Championships in Boston before turning her attention to the outdoor season and the US Olympic Trials.

Back in November we received an email from Tracy Arambula (now Najera) that said, “My fiancé and I are having a 5K the weekend of our wedding to raise money for your Foundation.” After a few emails were exchanged, Tracy sent me to a page on their wedding website detailing the race. It read:

We first heard about the KIMbia Foundation while listening to NPR one evening. The story prompted us to find out more. Once we started researching, we discovered that for just $500, we could sponsor a young adult to attend one full year of high school.

Given our shared passion for education and running, holding a race to benefit the KIMbia Foundation seemed like the perfect way to celebrate our marriage and to give back to the running community and to the world.

So on a cold evening in late December, fifty runners took to the streets of Austin, Texas for a good cause and an even better couple. The race generated $1,000, which will be used to sponsor two students in Kenya. Our most special thanks go out to Raul and Tracy Najera for organizing this event and for sponsoring two students in Kenya.

Find out more about the KIMbia Foundation.