Dear Friends of Common Hope for Health,
The new year has brought sudden, sobering challenges to Common Hope for Health and its Kenyan sister organization, Ugunja Community Resource Center. The political stalemate and incendiary violence that have paralyzed Kenya since the disputed presidential election on December 27th have humbled all of us at CHH and UCRC. Our priorities, so bright and sanguine at the end of 2007, have taken on a much harder edge: tend to the maimed; feed and shelter the homeless; comfort the angry and aggrieved; and most of all, stop the senseless violence and destruction that have torn apart this beautiful country and its beautiful people.
Thankfully, on February 28th, Kenya's political leaders signed a power-sharing deal that promises at last to bring an end to the political nightmare that has engulfed Kenya.
On reflection, we have learned an important lesson: We must take nothing—least of all, peace and stability—for granted. St. Paul's Health Center, the joint initiative of Common Hope for Health and Ugunja Community Resource Center, had operated since 2005—and UCRC itself since 1987—in a bubble of protective peace. That bubble has burst.
Truth be told, for years, every passing peaceful day was its own minor miracle. Kenya has long been fractured along steep, jagged lines of wealth and poverty, opportunity and powerlessness, health and sickness—chasms as dramatic on the country's social landscape as the Great Rift Valley on its physical landscape. A country cannot hold together under such conditions. In December, the grinding, shifting tectonic plates of Kenya's inequalities at last ripped apart at their seams, and the resulting quake had devastating consequences.
Common Hope for Health and Ugunja Community Resource Center have tried earnestly to respond with justice, solidarity, and vision in this setting of violence and suffering. At a time when many US-based nongovernmental organizations have drastically scaled-back their activities in Kenya, we have garnered international recognition for our far-reaching, holistic, community-driven response to the political crisis. We must always do more, but let us also celebrate small victories: in two exhausting months, against all odds, we—a student-led nonprofit in the US and a villager-led community organization in rural Kenya—have impacted thousands of lives and spurred an entire province to mobilize for peace and reconciliation. Never have I been more proud to belong to such a dynamic, humble, authentic community of change. Thank you for being a vital part of this community. Please continue to follow along with our activities through this website.
Even if the recent power-sharing deal holds and the acute crisis ends, the journey to recovery will yet be long. There is now—and will continue to be—an immense need for healing—not only in the literal sense of treating the sick and consoling the traumatized, but also in a broader social sense. The deep, malignant structural pathologies of modern Kenyan society—extreme poverty, widespread joblessness, gender inequality, land dispossession, disease and hunger, lack of education, abuse of democracy—must be addressed. Healing these ills—these cancers—is key to healing the body and spirit of the Republic of Kenya and, indeed, the whole human family.
This is the restated task before us: Common Hope for Healing. The effort has already begun, and your support has been critical. Thank you. Let us continue to struggle together—hands and hearts intertwined with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the homeless, the imprisoned, the sick, the poor, the orphaned, the bereaved, the dispossessed—toward a world in which all members of the human family are accepted and embraced with love.
Sincerely yours,
Scott Lee, MPhil, MPA
President
Common Hope for Health
