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Kakuma Refugee Camp ~ “The Spiritual Staying Power”
| Visit Report by Bro Innocent Baruani (Nairobi-Kibera Ecclesia, Kenya)
T
he northern part of Kenya is home to two
of the biggest refugee camps in the world.
The Kakuma and Daadab refugee camps have
a combined total population of over 600,000
refugees. These are mainly from Somalia,
South Sudan, Ethiopia, DR Congo, Burundi,
Uganda and Eritrea. Our preaching efforts,
launched four years ago, have been blessed
with the establishment of an ecclesia in the
Kakuma Refugee Camp.
The most recent trip we made to Kakuma
Camp came against the backdrop of an
outbreak of inter-community violent clashes
witnessed in the camp in November last year;
this resulted in 13 people hacked to death and
tens of thousands displaced from the camp;
most of them sought refuge in school buildings
and police stations. During that period, all
humanitarian organizations were forced to
suspend their activities because the camp had
then become a no-go area. It took the Kenyan
Police ten days to quell the violence and
restore normalcy. Some of our refugee
brethren lost their household items after their
houses were broken into by some unscrupulous
opportunists who took advantage of the chaos
to carry out widespread looting. Despite that,
we thank God for having watched over the
brothers and sisters as they were all
unscathed.
We arrived in Kakuma on Friday, 27 March at
6am and the preaching campaign kicked off in
the afternoon with the first Bible talk in a
series of three well-attended sessions con-
ducted the following day. Bro Allan Ketoyo
from Ndisi Ecclesia (South Nyanza area), who
came along with me, was the guest speaker.
He expounded on the parable of the “Fig
Tree” and I spoke about the parable of the
“Rich man and Lazarus” (Luke 16:19-31) which
elicited a lot of questions from those in atten-
dance who held the view that, immediately
after death, the soul of a righteous person
goes to heaven and that of the wicked one to
Kakuma Sunday School