It is a sad week in the Pokot community. The desert has not seen rain in a few weeks and water is scarce and cows are getting thin. And whenever people get hungry and thirsty fighting is sure to follow. Men have been raiding villages with guns and stealing cows. And Pokot and Turkana lives have been lost. Ombolion village, the home village of our Outreach coordinator Peter, was badly affected. And this fighting breaks my heart. Because I remember the night some 30 years ago when I was a small boy. The raiders attacked my home village in the dead of night. Those raiders killed so many of my cousins, aunts, and uncles.

And again this time someone so close to me died. He was a young man I was friends with from the village of Ombolion. He died trying to save his family’s cows from being stolen by raiders. After they killed him they threw his body in the bushes and his cows were stolen. I pray that this reminds you of the reason why we do this work. We are saving children from dying in the village fighting, or disease or hunger. We are building bunk beds and we suspect that there will be orphans from this village who may need to come to Daylight.

Now a day’s news moves so fast, even from the desert. And we got word of the attacks from Twitter, Facebook, and the Kenyan news.

The West Pokot Deputy Governor condemned the latest attack by the Turkana tribe: “It is just the other day that they killed two [Pokot] people and left their bodies decomposing in the bushes and stole 50 heads of cattle which are yet to be recovered. Has the Government left us to the mercy of the Turkanas?”

The Kenya army is currently being dispatched to bring food, return the stolen cows and arrest the raiders, but pray that no one else is hurt in the meantime.

I tell you the angels must be weeping. Let us pray like crazy.

Michael Kimpur
Kenyan Director