"Pray for us," the text message on my phone read. "My parents and my husband's parents have lost everything and we are hosting many family members who have become refugees overnight."
I sat staring at the tiny screen on my phone trying to comprehend what was going on in Kenya. The message had come in just days after December's disputed election results were announced and the news we had been reading on the internet was not good. Breaking down along tribal/political lines, the country had pockets of shocking violence springing up which would eventually take at least 850 lives in the ensuing weeks.
My mind raced back over the years. Byron and I arrived in Kenya in 1984. (Yes, we were very young.) We spent most of that initial 2 year commitment to Kenya in the lovely little town of Nakuru where we worked with a group of high school students who were hungry to grow closer to God. One of the students that I was closest to was Serah Njeri.
When the students were on leave from the boarding school in town, Byron and I would pack up our blue Landrover and travel out to different areas of the country so that we could visit some of them in their rural homes. We stayed in their villages and experienced the hospitality of many different cultures within the culture of Kenya. What I remember so clearly about Serah's home village was the happy relationship she had with the neighbors who all shared a forested highland area of fertile land.
Ten years later, in 1994, the tension at election time took a serious toll on Serah's community. We got the shocking news that her family home had been burnt down and Serah's relatives were left with nothing.
Oddly, this loss came shortly after our own home had burnt to the ground. Generous friends in the U.S. helped us rebuild quite quickly. We also had a small (in U.S. terms) insurance payment that we received from the company through which our organization had insured our far away home. My memory is that it was a couple of thousand dollars, meant to help replace personal items, not to cover the cost of a new building.
We saw the insurance as a gift that we could share. Because of the quick generosity of donors in the U.S. we already had what we needed to build again in Loita. Blessed with the insurance money that came after we were already in the re-building process, we saw Serah's family as a perfect place to pay it forward. Our Kenyan insurance went to their re-build and all of us were blessed.
We didn't see much of Serah over the years and we eventually left East Africa. In the fall of 2007, still quite newly back to Africa, I got an email asking if this was the correct email address for Byron and Lisa who used to live in Nakuru. Serah had found us and we were so happy to re-connect.
Serah and I passed sporadic email or text notes. I was concerned when things began to fall apart after Kenya's elections because I knew that her family came from one of the main ethnic groups that was targeted by angry demonstrators.
Soon we heard about her parents and husband's parents losing their homes (again to fire) and being chased out of their long-time communities. I tried to imagine how Serah, a teacher of teachers, and her pastor husband were managing to care for the extended family that was in so much need. But I never expected to hear the news we got next.
A couple of weeks ago I heard my phone go off at 6am. Squinting with my blurry morning eyes at the message, I tried to wrap my mind around what Serah was saying. "My husband Moses has gone to be with Jesus." This was all it said.
Moses contracted a fast moving, hard pneumonia that took his life and left Serah a young widow with 3 children and a large, extended family that still needs her.
This post has been quite long but the point of it is to give you an opportunity to respond to a needy family that is deeply affected by the turbulence in Kenya. At Wild Hope, we are not equipped to do mass refugee relief, but we can follow this relational line and make a difference for an extended family with shattered lives.
If you would like to give, please hit the donate button on the right of this blog and designate your gift for Serah Mburu. 100% of your donation will be passed along to Serah.
Thanks for joining us in this.
Lisa, for the Team at Wild Hope
