Please keep Kenya, its people, our students and staff, and its democratic institutions in your thoughts and prayers this week as they hold a presidential election on Aug. 8th.

Kenya has a long history of political violence. Emock (8th Grade at Daylight) is a student of history and politics and can tell you more.

“During the colonial era there were two kinds of people. Collaborators who believed that you should welcome the European colonialists and resistors who believed we needed to reject European rulers and govern ourselves.”

“I like Kenyan resisters because they didn’t want Europeans to interfere with Kenya. My hero is Orkoyot Koitalel Arap Samoei who fought the British to protect his land in the Rift Valley [Daylight is located in the Rift Valley]. He lost the war and he came to a peace meeting. He thought it would be a peace meeting. But he was shot by a British colonizer.”

Kenya finally won its independence in 1964 and had a one-party system until 1991. Since then, their elections have been marked by fraud, corruption, and violence.

According to Human Rights Watch,“three of the previous four elections were marred by violence, including the 2007-2008 election when 1,100 people were killed and 650,000 displaced. Party primaries in April were fraught with violence and rights abuses and public confidence in many of the institutions designed to alleviate these tensions is low.”

Daylight was founded in 2007 after post-election violence left 30 children without parents in Michael Kimpur’s home village. We now have 400 children on two campuses. Please join us in hoping and praying for the safety of our communities and all of Kenya.