Like Ruth, I reached saturation yesterday. I think it happened somewhere between the video of one man hacking at another man with a panga (machete) in Kibera, and the photo of dead children stacked in a morgue.

Although it’s been almost 20 years since I was in Kenya, it’s still home, and I’m filled with a deep sadness at the willful destruction and hatred going on there. I simply can’t get my mind around the kind of hatred that it takes to intentionally hack a 3 year old girl to death. It truly boggles the mind.

Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga, and the members of the ECK, have done an enormous injustice to their people, and a small subset of the people are carrying that injustice into their neighborhoods in a way that will reverberate for generations. It is truly tragic. I have to believe that it’s a tiny subset of the population, because to believe anything else would be monstrous. And certainly to hear people talking about it, everyone there is as horrified as I am at what’s happening. But, clearly, there are still mobs committing these atrocities.

Ruth has said, much more clearly than I could, what it is that I’m feeling. Like her, this is more real to me than news stories of tragedies in places I’ve never heard of, much less been, and I imagine that to most of my readers this is a far-away and somewhat less-than-real place.

So, if I’ve seemed somewhat distracted of late, at least you know why.