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Country Profiles |
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Support Crisis Relief in Kenya |
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In the camps for internally displaced persons in the badly affected Rift Valley, people are in desperate need of food, shelter, clean water, and medicine. FHI/Kenya is working with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to provide medical outreach services and supporting Catholic Relief Services' efforts to meet other basic needs in the Rift Valley camps. While health needs have increased greatly in Rift Valley, the ability of FHI and other groups to meet them has been diminished by the ongoing violence. Several health facilities have been burned, and those that remain are operating with less than 50 percent of their staff. The crisis has forced FHI to suspend its HIV prevention program with the police force, which is now struggling to maintain law and order, and its community outreach activities and peer HIV education because volunteers can no longer safely cross "ethnic" lines in their communities. Together, the loss of health facilities and suspension of community work are greatly impacting FHI's ability to provide family planning, reproductive health, tuberculosis, and HIV services in Rift Valley. On Kenya's western border, close to 6,000 people from Busia and Malaba districts crossed into Uganda after their houses were burned and property looted. FHI/Uganda responded to this situation by providing the refugees with peer education and condom distribution services and linking them to medical care (read more). Meanwhile, the violence that caused residents to flee Busia and Malaba has also affected FHI's ability to operate its programs in those districts. Several churches that partner with FHI have been vandalized, and FHI's SafeTStop HIV Resource Center in Malaba, normally a hub for HIV education and services for mobile populations, has been vandalized and temporarily closed. However, FHI staff in Busia and Malaba are seeing signs of hope as some individuals have begun returning looted property and seeking reconciliation.
While FHI works to provide those displaced with basic medical care and family planning and HIV prevention services, its biggest challenge is to continue supplying antiretroviral (ARV) treatment to HIV-positive children who have had to flee their homes. The longer these children remain displaced and unable to receive their medications, the greater the likelihood that they will develop resistance to the drugs. Lack of adequate food in the camps is expected to further weaken these already vulnerable children. "The drugs the children were using will largely become less effective when they resume taking them. Every effort needs to be made to minimize the duration in which they are unable to access their ARVs," explains FHI/Kenya's Dr. John Adungosi. You can make a donation to support FHI's work to help those displaced by the violence in Kenya by following the above link. Remember to select the "Use my donation for Kenyan post-election humanitarian relief" option. Current FHI Projects Affected by the Kenya Crisis: APHIA II CRTU ROADS PHOTOS: Displaced children at Rongai Camp (top) and Mogtio Camp (bottom). Parents gather behind the children. |
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FEBRUARY 2008 — Since the contested December presidential elections in Kenya, over a 1,000 people have been killed and 300,000 displaced by ethnic violence — and the humanitarian crisis continues to grow. FHI is helping to meet the immediate needs of those displaced while also working to continue delivering reproductive health, HIV, and other infectious disease services in increasingly challenging circumstances. 