Children are bearing the brunt of the shocking violence in Kenya that has followed the disputed January elections, says aid agency Save the Children. Many have been witness to or victims of attacks and abuse, and 100,000 children are now living in makeshift camps, often without clean water, sanitation and schooling. Carolyn Watt has been with the charity's teams working in the camps and is Sky's Eyewitness blogger in Kenya.
Nakuru, Kenya
It’s taken hours to make the journey from Nairobi to the southern Rift Valley town of Nakuru in western Kenya.
Having finally patched up the puncture that left our car paralysed five miles from the now infamous Nakuru Ask showground, we pull into the camp that over the last two months has become home to 14,500 people.
All of them have been chased from their homes by the vicious ethnic violence that has dominated Kenya since the disputed January election. I get out of the car. The stench of rotting cabbage and human waste is stifling.
This morning I left Kenya’s capital city, where the political great and the good continue tortured peace talks in an attempt to bridge the divide between President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition leader Raila Odinga.
Here, 150 kilometres away, families are still arriving at the camp. I meet men, women and children, who have witnessed heinous crimes.
Driven from their homelands, homes and businesses burnt to the ground, their families and communities plundered. They tell stories of murder, rape, forced evictions, looting and huge internal displacement.
They tell me about machete-wielding men who came to their homes stripped to the waist, some with guns, some carrying burning torches, others with bows and poisoned arrows. All with destruction in mind.
I meet one nine-year-old boy, Simon, who has not spoken a word since his father was beaten to death as he clung desperately to his body. Countless others, aged from four to 13 years old, recount stories of family and friends beaten – sometimes to death – their homes burnt.
Who can tell the long-term impact on these children of what they have witnessed in the nationwide violence that has been driven by ethnicity and perceived political affiliations, but blurred with opportunistic vandalism and banditry.
I am with a team of social workers from Save the Children, which is working in the camp to trace the families of separated children, to train teachers to support traumatised children, and has set up ‘safe play’ areas in the camps to make sure children have a protected place to relax and play.
Many of the children we speak to have been separated from their parents and families, exposed to exploitation and abuse.
There are unconfirmed reports of girls as young as nine years old being lured into prostitution by older men from the showground gates. Some are orphans. Others left parents behind in villages across the Rift Valley as they fled for safety.
Nakuru for now remains calm. While the possibility of revenge attacks remains, the 7pm city-wide curfew has prevented much of the violence that characterised the previous six weeks.
But as the talks go on, what next for the displaced people like those holed up in Nukuru’s showground?
Save the Children says that 10 million children are dying unnecessarily each year from illnesses that are easy to cure. It has published a new report, Saving Children's Lives: Why Equity Matters. Save The Children's Head of News Dominic Nutt is Sky's Eyewitness blogger in Angola
Luanda, Angola
Day Four
Save the Children’s campaign is to cut by two-thirds the number of children who die before their fifth birthday.
Yesterday I was saying how easy it is to save a child’s life – with clean water, a mosquito net and cheap vaccinations.
We know we can do it, with your help. With 10 million children under the age dying each year from preventable diseases, we know we have to act.
But of course, governments in poor countries like Angola have to take their share of the responsibility too – or their share of the blame if they fail their own children.
The reason I’m here is because in Angola, a country that is not officially ‘poor’, one in four children die before they are five.
Change for children is possible.
If you need an example of how it can be done, look at Bangladesh – a country that is poorer than Angola but, by following the right healthcare and child-friendly policies, has reduced its child mortality figures.
What’s going wrong in Angola? Well the Angolan government can and should answer for itself.
What I have seen has left me shocked: flashy towers going up all over the capital in a relentless drive for the petro-dollar while nearby were sprawling slums where people lived in tiny tin shacks from whence a constant trail of women and children ferried water, in buckets, from unsanitary trucks or from holes in the ground.
Those with an electricity supply (very few people have electricity – and even those who are connected find their power is constantly interrupted) boil their water to clean it. Those without, drink it dirty or add bleach.
I saw children collecting water from a broken mains pipe. I even saw people mopping up water spilled from a tanker that had crashed and was on its roof. The driver would have been badly injured, or even killed. But no one could afford to let the water drain away.
And I saw money being spent on pumping more sand on to the beach – presumably to extend it to make it look pretty, though I can’t be sure as no one could or would tell me why this was happening.
Basically, for all the world, it looked to me that money was being thrown at expensive offices, housing and other schemes while the poor went without.
Save the Children has managed to cut the malaria rate among children in one area of the country by around 80 per cent by handing out mosquito nets. As a result children who would otherwise have died, will live beyond their fifth birthday.
Simple steps do work. But we need governments to do their bit too.
They need to open and staff health clinics that the poor can afford to use. And they need to provide clean water for all.
The Angolan economy may be expanding, but the benefits must be used to help the children.
:: Find out more about Save the Children's biggest global campaign by clicking here
Day Three
One in four children in Angola die before their fifth birthday. Most Angolans have bigger families than we do in Britain – five or more kids is not unusual.
So imagine this: if you were an Angolan mum or dad, the chances are that you would have had to bury at least one of your children in the past few years while he or she was still a toddler.
But if you’re like me, these statistics will leave you cold. Angola is a long way away and frankly, there’s nothing we can do about it – is there?
Let me answer that by introducing you to a woman I met today – Maria Antonio Pedro. She lives in a slum called Hoji-Ya-Henda on the edge of the Angolan capital, Luanda.
Today, Maria has four children aged between two and 12. She used to have five but in 2001 her youngest boy died, aged only three. She and her second husband (her first died) scrape a living as best they can – though, as is typical in Luanda, they have no regular work.
"I need about 1,800 Kwanzas (about £12.50) a day for food and water for me and my children," Maria says. "I don't know how much we earn because sometimes it's nothing and other times it’s something. Yesterday I was selling chicken in the market and I earned 400 Kwanzas (about £2.70)."
She spends about £1.35 a day on buying water – dirty water – that is delivered by lorry. To try to clean it she puts household bleach in it.
Apart from the fact it tastes disgusting, bleach does not kill all the germs and like millions of youngsters in Angola, her children constantly suffer from stomach upsets and diarrhoea – one of the big child killers in poor countries.
It sounds simple and it sounds stupid – why should a kid die from a stomach upset? The problem when you’re poor and don’t have clean water is that as a child, you quickly and fatally dehydrate.
Without treatment – something as simple as oral re-hydration salts which cost just a few pence – you lose vital salts and minerals. But clinics in Angola are dreadful places with few medicines – and to get treatment costs.
When Maria’s son died, they still charged her for his treatment.
"I don’t know why you’re asking me about this," Maria says of the death of her boy. "It’s not unusual. Yes, I think about him every day. Why are you interested? No one has asked these questions before."
I feel crushed and reel out the usual platitudes about wanting to tell her story and wanting to help. But I’m mumbling now and want to leave.
Save the Children has launched a campaign to address the absurdity and horror of these statistics – the ones that this morning, before I met Maria, went over my head.
Ten million children die, like Maria’s, every year before reaching their fifth birthday. Maria’s boy is just one.
Save the Children has launched its campaign to save a child’s life. It is shockingly simple. I urge you to help. With you we can save lives. To find out how, check out our website.
:: Find out more about Save the Children's biggest global campaign by clicking here
Day Two
Here in my room in my guest house in a district of Luanda called Combatente I am melting. The air conditioning machine has blown up.
When it was on it was like sharing a small cupboard with a bronchial byplane revving for takeoff – although I suspect a plane would have produced more of a breeze than the air conditioning unit ever managed in its short life.
I am wearing only a kikoi (a Kenyan version of a sarong) hunched over a laptop which is adding to the stifling heat. But I can’t keep cool and am pouring litre after litre of tepid mineral water down my throat to keep hydrated. Water is precious round here and I am guarding mine jealously.
Earlier, my colleagues and I ended our day above the city on a hill where the Portuguese colonists built a big, white fort to keep out rival Dutch imperialists.
As the sun set over the oil derricks off the Luandan coast, a massive and prolonged roar rose out of the slums below. The whole city cheered as one.
The national football team had just scored a screamer of a goal against their quarter final opponents, Egypt, in the African Nations Cup.
We had spent the day in those slums and down there, in the heat and the filth of Luandan poverty there seemed little to cheer about.
In Hoji-ya-Henda filth piled up in the streets. And you can’t escape the stench of human spoil. The dirt roads are pitted and full of foul water and the inhabitants broiled in sour sweat.
No water is pumped here and few houses are on the electricity grid. Those that have power allow their friends and neighbours to tap their supply with wires which are strung across streets and alleys. It’s dangerous, when it works, but even the legitimate supply fails often.
And water is even harder to come by. It is trucked in by entrepreneurs who sell it by the bucket to families with little or no incomes. It isn’t clean – so mothers have to put bleach – yes, household bleach – in it to kill the germs, before their children drink it.
Angola has the second highest child mortality rate in the world with one in four children dying before they reach their fifth birthdays. One of the biggest killers is diarrhoea. When a child gets a stomach upset – which is very often here - they quickly dehydrate and if they are not treated, they stand a good chance of dying.
I spoke to two mothers who had lost three babies between them. They both said that their surviving children constantly suffer from diarrhoea.
It is obvious that clean water would save many babies in Hoji-ya-Henda. And so would a decent, free health service.
Both mothers told me they had taken their babies to local clinics which could do nothing to save their children – but the clinics still charged their parents for their services. In one case, because the child died, the clinic offered a 50 per cent discount – some sort of blessing, perhaps.
Day One
It is eight years since I was last in Angola: since then it’s changed and so have I.
Back in 1999 I hated it and it hated me.
Then the west African country was still at war with itself. It was a vicious, nasty and spiteful war, as bitter as it was pointless. The dominant and ruling force, the ostensibly socialist MPLA, ran the north, including the capital, Luanda. UNITA controlled the rural south.
It all ended, suddenly, when the UNITA leader was assassinated. Bang and it was over.
The war had turned brother on brother. Thousands were killed and many more were wounded.
Vast swathes of land were sown with millions of landmines; boys and girls who should have been at school learning to read and write were learning to kill.
And yet suddenly, for no reason it was over. A good thing, of course – but if it were that easy to stop the fighting, why on earth didn’t it end years ago? No one can convince me that one life wasted in those 30-odd years was worth it.
When I first visited Luanda, the conflict still had a few years to run, but the harvest of war was already being gathered. The capital was full of refugees who had fled the fighting from across the country.
They lived in squalor with no work, no housing, poor water and bad food. Children in rags sold chewing gum, key rings, shoelaces and general tat to drivers in traffic jams.
Young girls, raped and impregnated by enemy combatants, raised the unwelcome fruit of the killers’ loins in sweaty UN tent cities.
Many people hobbled about on limbs destroyed by antipersonnel mines – ordnance designed not to kill but ‘only’ to injure, so the victim would remain a live but useless burden on his combatant comrades. Planted in fields, and around water sources and fruit trees, it was more often than not that civilians, especially children, who bore the brunt of their cruelty.
Children as young as five hunted like feral pack animals in the streets, swarming round the rich, white foreigner. They were charmless, because they were hungry and had no adults to feed them.
Their frowns and scowls belied a pain that no five year old should have had to endure. They would run at me as soon as I immerged from my guest house.
It was about survival – their survival. It was life or death and they would not, could not, go away.
But on my first day back, it seems all is different, at least so far.
I have travelled across Africa many times since that long-ago trip to Angola and I am less easily affected. My heart has not exactly hardened, but I am better prepared, emotionally and mentally. Back then I was more vulnerable and afraid.
The war has ended and there seem to be fewer children out on the streets and everyone seems slightly better dressed – not well dressed, necessarily, but perhaps a little less ragged. On first sight, maybe everyone is just a bit better off. I’m not sure.
And today, there is a mobile phone network. I can call my wife whenever I want. I’m not lonely and if things get on top of me I can call Glenda and seek her counsel. Back then, there was literally no means of communicating with colleagues, friends or family and I felt trapped.
I am writing this blog sitting on a clean, cockroach-free bed using a wireless internet connection having eaten an ok meal in a safe part of town. Amazing.
And outside, I can see huge, opulent, housing blocks going up. I can count 15 cranes in different locations from my small window alone.
Something is happening here in Luanda. Maybe it is a good thing – I don’t know and I can’t yet say. Because if I have learned anything in the eight years since I first came to Angola and Africa, it is not to judge by first impressions.
:: Find out more about Save the Children's biggest global campaign by clicking here
By Dave, Republican blogger from Ohio
This weekend the competition to find the UK's entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest gets under way. One of the six contestants hoping to represent the UK is a bit different - she's Romanian. Here Simona Armstrong tells Sky News Online why she would be proud to fly the flag for her adopted country.
By Jeff Coryell (aka. Yellow Dog Sammy), US political blogger
By Jaksa Scekic, Serbian journalist
