Running through the quiet, picturesque countryside around Iten, it’s hard to imagine the violence that was wreaked in the days following Kenya’s last election at the end of 2007. Eldoret and the surrounding area was one of the main epicentres of ethnic violence that left 800 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.
In the town of Burnt Forest, just south of Eldoret, the scarred remains of houses, burnt to the ground in the violence, stand as silent reminders of what happened in those terrible weeks.
“Was the town named after the violence?” I ask Isaac Arusei, an athlete from Burnt Forest, as we drive along the town’s only road.
“No,” he says. “It was named before that, after the forest here caught fire.” Arusei is taking me to his home village, not far from the town, along a bumpy dirt road. As we arrive, the children and teachers from the local primary school line the road on either side, singing a song: “Welcome, visitors, we have been waiting, oh so long, to welcome you.”
Arusei is not the most successful athlete in Kenya, but he has won a few thousand dollars in road races here and there. So when the primary school in his home village was destroyed in the election violence, the local people turned to him, pleading with him to start a new school.
Since I’ve been in Kenya, I’ve met lots of athletes who have started schools. It is partly a way to give something back to the community that nurtured them, partly a way to leave behind a legacy, and for some, it’s an investment. Arusei, though, was simply responding to a desperate need.
The one school building at Arusei Junior Academy is small and basic – a timber frame covered in corrugated metal. The children at the school are both Kikuyu and Kalenjin – the two ethnic groups that clashed after the election. They smile shyly at us as we walk through on to the school site and over to a fence, where we are to plant a tree each.
Planting a tree is a huge honour in Kenya, reserved for the most important visitors. I feel uncomfortable being a special guest simply because of the colour of my skin. Many of the children here have never seem a mzungu [white person], Arusei tells me.
“They are so excited,” he says. “They will remember this day for the rest of their lives.”
After we plant the trees, he asks me to speak to them. They don’t seem very excited, as they sit in front of me on the grass; that is, until I tell them that I came to Kenya on an aeroplane.
“Who would like to go on an aeroplane one day?” I ask them, and every little hand shoots up. For children who have probably never even been to Eldoret, let alone Nairobi, a white stranger from across the seas is a fairly exotic visitor. Before I leave I go over to shake their hands, and a huge scrum ensues in which the teachers have to step in to save me from being trampled under hundreds of tiny feet.
Arusei’s house, a simple wooden homestead, sits next to the school and he invites me to have lunch with him. The male teachers and school directors join us, while the female teachers serve the food and eat in a separate room. On the otherwise bare walls of the house hang Arusai’s trophies and medals.
It’s easy to see why so many people in Kenya try to become athletes. These shiny pieces of gold and silver represent the most hopeful path out of the poverty and hardship that is the lot for most people here. But with success, comes responsibility. Not all the athletes manage to handle it so well, but in this corner of the Rift Valley, near the ill-fated town of Burnt Forest, Arusei Junior Academy is an example of how success on the roads of Europe and the US can bring huge benefits to struggling communities here in Kenya.
• The book Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn will be published in 2012
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