The Assemblies of God Church

The following post was written by UUSC President Charlie Clements. Clements writes from Kenya, where he is leading an emergency delegation to assess the political and humanitarian crisis that has engulfed the country in the wake of the flawed presidential elections of December 2007.

We see a lot of destruction of shops along the roads leading to town. We turn off onto a dirt road. Our driver stops to ask a man digging around a burned structure if there is any danger on the road ahead. The man says he thinks it’s safe. I ask him, through our escorts, if he would tell us what happened here.

There are about six charred vertical poles that seem to define spaces about ten-feet wide. There are four such spaces. He’s been removing corrugated tin that was nailed to the post, the last of what appear to be stalls in front of a wall with soot-covered letters that spell out SWAMP HOTEL. There are broken plates scattered in the ashes, only a handful of burned silverware remains. The man says this was a hotel, a hardware store, a grocery store, and a butcher shop. I am amazed because the whole area is no more than 40 by 40 feet. He explains that he had recently taken out a loan and was buying this “mini-mall” from its absentee Kikuyu owner. He says he will still have to pay the loan. He’s Luo, and clearly the “hooligans” who burned it down didn’t know he was the new owner. He’s stripping the corrugated tin because it will soon be stolen if he doesn’t…the silverware is all that is salvageable. He says 15 people were employed in these small stores. I thank him, and we continue slowly driving down the narrow dirt road a mile or more.

I wonder where we are going. We occasionally pass a man on a bicycle or on foot. The driver asks if everything is quiet in the neighborhood. We stop at an intersection and peer behind a thin hedge that grows around a fence. Now I know where we are without anyone explaining. We have come to the site of the Assemblies of God Church, where 30 or more people perished in a fire on January 2. Yellow crime-scene tape blocks the entrance.

The rubble appears to be virtually untouched, except the bodies have been removed and buried. Many of the victims were children. There are several bouquets of flowers, now wilted or dried, stuck in fence posts. I had intended to bring one, but didn’t know we were already en route. I guess our driver wasn’t sure we could get here until he checked it out. (There had been a number of unmanned rock roadblocks near where we turned off to come here.)

The rubble of the collapsed, burned church includes a dozen charred bicycles parked in front. In the midst of the rubble, still visible, is a wheelchair. I remember reading a news account that one of the victims had been an 80-plus-year-old woman who had perished in her wheelchair. Most of the people unable to get out of the barricaded doors had tumbled out of broken windows, escaping with cuts or burns. The perpetrators were “hooligans” who had blocked the doors and used kerosene to set the church on fire.

I ask our driver what could possibly provoke the kind of hatred that could lead someone to set a church full of women and children on fire. He said the Kikuyus in this area had been taunting their neighbors before the elections, saying that Kenya was going to be ruled by another Kikuyu (Kibaki) and that when he came to power they would rub their neighbors’ faces in the dirt. He says this without rancor, as if he were merely reporting the facts. Who knows the truth. Prior to the elections, there was little overt violence – 70 deaths nationwide – but, evidently, tensions had been rising in what was seen as a contest for spoils (with Kibaki’s PNU party) and a chance to end “feeding at the trough” and create economic opportunities for those excluded for decades (with Raila’s ODM party).

We pause to pay our respects in silence and leave quickly. The driver doesn’t want to hang around here. The car is quiet. I am engrossed, and suspect the others are too, thinking about the horror that transpired here just a few weeks ago.

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