KENYA:Kenya's leaders may have agreed to share power, but its people are still afraid to return to their homes, writes Stephanie McCrummenin Nakuru, Kenya
A WEEK after Kenya's warring political leaders signed a power-sharing agreement, Marian Wambui arrived at a camp for displaced people here, her house having been burned to the ground just two days earlier.
As President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga celebrated in Nairobi, the mother of two was wondering where in the unfamiliar sprawl she might put the two plastic bags of belongings that were all she had left in the world.
Wambui stood in the sun, facing the details of her new life: a registration tent and a light blue meal card.
A long line led to workers adding fresh names to a list already 16,000 long - mostly people from Kibaki's Kikuyu ethnic group who had been chased from their homes in this western Rift Valley region and were now living in rows of white tents in a dusty field.
"I was expecting peace, but now I don't see any peace," said Wambui (34), who is Kikuyu, adding that she had thought she would be safe once the agreement was signed.
"When I heard people talk about that deal, I was very happy," she said. "It doesn't mean anything to me now."
Kenya's volatile Rift Valley has become a landscape of uprooted lives. Bitterness lingers, along with an almost triumphant mood among the local people who have driven out Kikuyus they perceive as privileged and arrogant.
In the town from which Wambui fled, young men leaning in barbershop and bar-room doorways said her house had been burned in a fit of reckless jubilation after Odinga signed the deal, which one local leader described as "a ceasefire", not a settlement.
Others said flatly that if their Kikuyu neighbours returned, as Kibaki has urged them to do, they would be attacked, suggesting how easily the country might slip back into the ethnic violence that killed at least 1,000 people and displaced 600,000 after the disputed December 27th presidential election.
Yet with those tensions festering, neither Kibaki nor Odinga has set foot in any camps for the internally displaced or, for that matter, any Rift Valley towns since the campaign season, encouraging instead a kind of national amnesia as a means of healing.
In his first major speech since the crisis began, Kibaki urged Kenyans to "please forget the history of what happened", while Odinga instructed his followers to "forget the differences caused by the election".
Here in Nakuru, though, and in the dozens of other camps that dot the countryside, people said they could not easily forget the neighbours who chased them with machetes, killed their husbands or wives and destroyed farms and businesses that had taken decades to build.
"I'm strongly convinced that what's done cannot be undone," said a Kikuyu father of five who had just arrived at a camp for displaced people in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha and was afraid to give his name.
"What I've seen, what I've heard, I think I'd be cheating to say I'm comfortable now. Where shall I go? Will I be able to resume my normal life?"
The man's new home is a roadside camp consisting of thousands of tents, where enough people arrive daily to convince others that it is not yet safe to return home.
"People are still coming here on buses," said Agnes Wairimu, whose Rift Valley farm was burned down. "It's still going on, so we don't see how we can go back there. People are still in that mood."
Naivasha, a town of flower farms and empty tourist lodges, has absorbed busloads of displaced Kikuyus.
It was also the scene of a brutal revenge attack in which Kikuyu gangs went door-to-door hacking people mostly from the Luo, Kalenjin and Luhya ethnic groups assumed to have backed Odinga.
Many people displaced by that attack are living in a second camp several miles from where the Kikuyus are staying.
They said it was better that way, to remain separated, and that they were uneasy about going into town.
"The tension is still there," said Vincent Ochimbor (37) who works at a nearby flower farm. "After the deal was signed, some people went to town and they were beaten."
Many people have left Naivasha, preferring to be jobless rather than work with Kikuyu neighbours who had attacked them.
"There are people who saw their wife or husband or child killed," said Matthew Obonyo, a friend of Ochimbor.
"You find the people who participated are workmates and you're told to forget. But it's difficult." -