For the past two weeks we have been sharing a series of inspiring stories and videos as part of our annual partnership drive. As you reflect on these stories, consider joining our efforts and renewing your support as an Operation Blessing Monthly Partner.

KENYA – Little Lekini’s name means “small and weak.” And it was a fitting name.

Abandoned by his mother at a tender age, Lekini never received proper nutrition or care. At the age of three, he was severely emaciated, weighing only 17 pounds.

When Operation Blessing teams found Lekini, he was malnourished, covered in flies and so hungry that he was eating dirt. They immediately brought him food and vitamins, and took him to a local hospital where he received urgent medical care.

Today, thanks to the help of partners like you, Lekini is thriving. He has nutritious food to eat, proper medical care, and he even started preschool.

He is doing so well that the name Lekini no longer fits him. Now he is called Baraka, meaning “blessing.”

“It truly is a blessing that he has survived,” said Hellen Omae, OB Kenya staff.

Today you can begin having an impact like this on even more orphans like Baraka. Will you to live your faith in 2012 by partnering with Operation Blessing and committing to bless the poor in the coming year?

DADAAB, Kenya – Operation Blessing’s National Director of Kenya, Jefferson Nyatuka, gives a special report on the famine plaguing the horn of Africa and how Operation Blessing is helping refugee families at Dadaab camp.

NAIROBI, Kenya – After the tragic pipeline fire and explosion in Sinai slum earlier this week, officials are confirming that more than 100 people died and many more are suffering from serious burns.

OB Kenya has been distributing relief supplies such as hygiene items, food, clothing, and school supplies to families whose homes were destroyed in the fire.

Operation Blessing staff visited with children affected by the tragedy, distributing books and coloring materials. “They were so excited and appreciated what Operation Blessing had done,” said Hellen, from OB Kenya. “No other organization had remembered them.”

Operation Blessing is also working with the Red Cross in Kenya to distribute donated items.

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NAIROBI, Kenya – In Nairobi, the Sinai slum sits on top of a pipeline that feeds a nearby fuel depot. Yesterday morning, spilled petroleum that had collected in the drainage system caught fire and a subsequent explosion killed nearly 100 people. Many caught in the melee tried to jump into the nearby storm drainage ditch to put out the flames, but the result was deadly. Hundreds of burn victims were admitted to a nearby hospital.

The rain that day only made matters worse as storm water mixed with petroleum drained into the nearby valley. Hundreds of structures were burned to the ground and more than 1,000 people have been left without shelter.

OB Kenya is already working on relief efforts in Sinai Slum. Teams will be providing displaced victims with clean water to drink and essential food staples. They will also be distributing basic necessities such as diapers, baby food and bedding to families who lost their homes.

KENYA – The famine that is gripping the Horn of Africa has been gaining attention in the world media with much of the focus being on the Somali refugees pouring over the border to Kenya in search of food.

But Kenya is facing a massive crisis of its own—recent reports of severe food shortages and famine have started emerging from the northern Kenyan state of Turkana.

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I joined the Operation Blessing Kenya team for an emergency response to several remote villages in the Turkana region. As we flew into the regional capital, Lodwar, I was amazed at the expanse of yellow desert below. I have been to the desert of east Kenya before but never knew that this northern part of the country was such a dry wilderness.

As we drove through Lodwar, the stifling hot wind blew sand across the road and coated our vehicle with a fine dust. Our driver frequently used the windshield wipers to brush the dust from the glass. Actually that’s all the wipers are good for here, it hasn’t rained in over two years, and it shows.

The town quickly faded into a huge expanse of desert with the occasional shrub or tree; there was little sign of life for mile after mile. We followed an Operation Blessing truck, rated to carry a 10 ton payload, but, like so many trucks in Africa, this one was over-stuffed with almost 14 tons of maize (grain). Our team had pre-purchased the food across the border in Uganda where it was cheaper since the harvest was good in Uganda this year.

After more than an hour of driving along a sun-scorched, sandy trail we came across a group of people sitting under a tree. Nearby there were three camels doing their best to strip the leaves off a thorny shrub.

We stopped and got out to talk to the group. The women wore beautiful beaded collars that stretched from their shoulders up to their chins. The multi-colored beads contrasted vividly against the bland desert. With their colorful outfits, these Turkana tribes-people were some of the most striking I have ever seen.

But behind the beauty of their dress, these people are facing serious problems; they live in a land with no food and hardly any water. One woman gestured to her stomach to tell me she was hungry. Jefferson, our Kenya country director, told them that we were distributing food in a village up to trail. They immediately started gathering their things to head where we were going.

We soon entered a small village where the huts scattered on either side of the dusty road were surrounded by fences made of thorn bushes. These weren’t mud huts—you need water to make mud—these huts were made entirely from straw and looked more like giant bird nests than homes. But millions of people live like that in northern Kenya. It’s estimated that 3.5 million people are affected by the famine in Kenya alone.

Our truck came to a stop near a cluster of trees and the team started to prepare for a distribution. We had been led to this community by the district commissioner’s office because it was particularly hard hit and there had been reports of deaths from hunger. The district commissioner had arranged for local police to help us with the distribution, and it was a good thing because we soon had almost 1,500 people clambering for a place in the distribution line.

Once things got underway it went fairly smooth. The community had shade under the trees and the long lines moved steadily as OBI team members scooped the grain into the sacks and baskets that the villagers turned up with.

I walked around the crowds and marveled at the beauty of the Turkana jewelry, but as I did I noticed the frail children strapped to the mothers’ backs. From under the brightly patterned clothes of the mothers the tiny frail arms and legs of their children dangled in the heat.

The children and the elderly are the most serious victims of the famine. The lack of food stunts a child’s development and it robs an older person of the strength to fight off sickness. Some of the villagers took us for a short walk to see the grave of a person that died just days earlier, they said from starvation. There in the desert sun a pile of rocks was mounded on the body. Sand had already started to envelope the grave and soon it will become hidden by the same desert that claimed this person’s life.

I asked the villagers what they ate during good times. I learned that they hardly ever ate local plants or vegetables because even in the rainy years it is too hard to grow crops. They usually survive on milk from their animals and after selling some animals they might buy some grain or vegetables occasionally.

But now, with the drought, their animals are dying and those that haven’t yet died are too dehydrated to produce milk. There is literally nothing nutritious to eat here—nothing. Some had resorted to eating leaves and even then they rationed their intake to make sure there was enough for the whole family.

As we walked back to the distribution site, I saw another example of how vital these supplies were. At the foot of the truck where the team was unloading the sacks there were two women sifting their fingers through the dust searching for maize kernels that had fallen from the sacks. As they picked through the sand they clutched a small handful of kernels covered in grit; this might be a meal for them. Those women were part of the 500 families that received food in that village, but they were determined to find every last grain.

Once the distribution was finished the crowd began to disperse. As we drove back along the sand trail, we saw women with sacks of food on their heads heading back to their huts and people from other villages heading off into the open wilderness—some had walked over five miles to collect the food.

The next day we went out to a different community for another distribution. It was not much different from the previous day—more hungry families, more tales of starvation, more emergency food handed out. The needs are endless here and Operation Blessing cannot keep giving out emergency food forever, nor do we want to. We are actively working on permanent solutions to the drought problem in Kenya.

Already in two Kenyan communities we have provided water and irrigation for crops. Through training and capacity building we have managed to provide food security and even income to a Masai village in Ewasso, and we are almost ready to do the same in a Masai village at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Water is the key to the hunger crisis and while we were in Turkana we met with local planning offices and officials to discuss targeting yet another community with a deep water well and irrigation project.

Through actively working on food security solutions, Operation Blessing is confident that we can move communities away from needing emergency food relief, and even beyond that, we have seen how communities like Ewasso can grow a surplus of food to earn an income. But while we develop our food security programs we still need to be there for those that are starving in the Horn of Africa and that is why we need your support in helping us continue to provide relief in Kenya and beyond.

KENYA – Today we visited a Masai village where Operation Blessing is building a new school. This building will prevent the need for children to walk over two miles through tall grasses where they have sometimes been trampled by elephants and attacked by lions.

For even more protection, large wooden posts will form a fence around the school.

Finally, we’re also drilling a deep well that will provide safe water and irrigate crops that we will teach the tribe to grow.

Her plot stood amongst a sea of freshly painted white crosses at the Langata cemetery. Over 1000 people have been killed in violence that has swept through Kenya since the disputed presidential election in December 2007. An estimated 300,000 have been displaced from their homes in the turmoil.

What began as land disputes and political differences has boiled over into cross tribal hatred. Gangs from both sides have been carrying out brutal attacks with the focus of the violence being in the Rift Valley region. Fourteen years after the Rwanda genocide, it seems East Africa has a new ethnic conflict.

The mobs attack with machetes, clubs and arrows. Many locals believe that the perpetrators are hired by politically motivated forces. “If they kill you, they are paid 1000 shillings,” said one teenager in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. “We fear the Mungikis,” he said.

The Mungikis are said to be the driving force behind much of the violence on one side of the conflict. Characterized by their dreadlocked hair, the Mungikis are a cultish sect of the Kikuyu tribe. Mobs of Mungikis have been sweeping through towns and villages on killing sprees. Then there are rival gangs from the Luo and Kalenjin tribes who are carrying out their own attacks in return.

Bodies are found mutilated or burned, and as proven by the murder of Mary, the killers do not even discriminate by age. Her widowed mother could only grab Mary’s younger sister as she fled for her life during an attack in the Kibera slum. When she returned to her shack she found Mary dead; the coroner said she was strangled. I visited a school in the slum where one child told me how he saw a man dragged into the street and ritually circumcised in the manner of a rival tribe.

There has been a recent lull in the violence in Nairobi and on the surface the city seemed almost normal. But everywhere you look you can see people migrating. Families are packing up their belongings and using the calm period to relocate.

“We are going to live with our family because we are afraid,” said one Nairobi slum dweller as he packed his belongings into the back of a pickup truck.

I left for Nakuru in the Rift Valley from where Operation Blessing is coordinating our response to the crisis. As we drove past magnificent views of the valley I thought it sadly ironic that here a new “rift” is developing. Only one year ago I was driving through a peaceful Kenya to Somalia to work amongst displaced Somalis. Now we were headed into the interior to provide relief to displaced Kenyans.

In stark contrast to the images of violence I had seen in the media just a few days earlier, Nakuru was quiet when we arrived. But I could immediately sense the tension in the air. Displaced people are flooding into the city from the surrounding countryside. They are converging on stadiums, showgrounds, police stations and churches in search of refuge.

GHOST VILLAGES

I visited the Nakuru Showground where 5,000 people are sheltering. Families are crammed in amongst furniture that they salvaged as they fled. I peered in under a plastic sheet suspended between a bed frame and a cupboard. A family of seven were sitting around a cooking pot being heated by burning plastic bottles. The smoke was choking. I asked the father how he was able to give me such a broad smile under the circumstances. “I can smile because I am alive,” he beamed. “If we had stayed (in our village) we would already be dead”.

On one side of the showground in the tiered seating there were over 1,500 children each holding a plate waiting to be fed. Some were happy to have their picture taken, others sat there listless, their eyes glazed over. I spoke with the woman coordinating the children’s programs at the showground. “Some of these children will never see their parents again,” she told me.

The conditions were horrific but these were the lucky ones. There are non-governmental organizations working to deliver relief to the victims in Nakuru. Our target are those people further out into the bush. Those that have lost everything and those that cannot even afford to leave in search of safety.

We drove two hours outside of Nakuru towards one of our food distribution sites. During the drive I spoke with one of our Kenyan coordinators. He is from the Taita tribe which originates from the coastal region. The Taitas are not heavily involved in the conflict so when I asked him if he felt threatened his answer concerned me. “I don’t really feel in danger, but my wife is a Kikuyu so I’m very affected,” he said.

This reminded me of the type of things said before the Rwanda crisis. Rwanda has been mentioned a lot in conversations with other aid workers. In so many ways the Kenya crisis could head towards the same end as the atrocities in Rwanda. History has proven too many times that the words “Never again” are meaningless when spoken about genocide. It seems that the elections were the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back.’  While the politicians negotiate a diplomatic solution in Nairobi, the hatred brewing in the countryside might be uncontainable.

As we approached the distribution site signs of the violence were everywhere. Villages were like ghost towns as we passed rows of burnt homes and businesses. In one village I saw children sifting through the ashes of a burnt house. With crops and livelihoods burnt and destroyed food is a priority.

We are working with International Aid Services of Denmark to identify the victims and prioritize them according to their level of need. It was heart-wrenching to see the desperation of those we had to turn away. With so many displaced there are simply not enough resources to go around.

We are also supporting our German medical partner Humedica who have a team of volunteer doctors on the ground. The crisis has escalated the risk of disease outbreaks and illnesses related to poor nutrition.

NAKURU Region, Kenya – Civil unrest and outbursts of ethnic violence has created a serious humanitarian crisis in Kenya.

More than a quarter of a million people have been uprooted after President Mwai Kibaki was returned to power late December in a disputed election.

The resulting hostility has caused many tribes to rehash old geographic boundary lines and economic power struggles.

“This crisis is much more than angry party supporters fighting over a disputed election,” said David Darg, Operation Blessing’s deputy director of international programs, who is on the ground in Kenya. “The election was just the straw that broke the camel’s back and years of ethnic tensions have surfaced.”

OBI has teamed up with International Aid Services to respond to the growing crisis and thousands of displaced people who have fled their homes. Together, a 2-month project has been set into motion that will reach 15,000 people in four villages with aid. A combined total of more than $115,000 from the two organizations has been poured into the project.

In addition to food, blankets, mattresses, sanitation kits, clothes, medication and utensil kits, relief efforts will also include trauma counseling for families.