COVID19: This Easter, Rural Kenyans 'keep on Because We Must’

On this extraordinary Easter, as Kenya enters its third week of COVID-19 partial lockdown and curfew, will these be the days that we finally acknowledge the importance of the informal economy that “employs over 80% of the Kenyan working population” – and the essential role that rural women play in it? Coronavirus is showing us that all 47 million Kenyans depend on the women who are risking their lives to feed the country – and who remain living below the poverty line.

As we make our modest preparations here at Rona Orphans and Widows Centre in Wagoma Village for this most hope-filled of holidays in the calendar, I find myself thinking about all those resilient rural women. When I look into their faces, as I do every day, I see the tracks left by poverty, by economic inequalities, by the daily struggle for gender rights, and now, ushered in with the pandemic, ever more numerous cases of sexual violence.

I think, too, of how often those faces are laughed at, mocked, denigrated. How these courageous women are so casually dismissed in social media posts made by the very people who depend on them for food and more: the usually carefree middle-class Kenyans who are now learning what it is like to fear cashlessness, joblessness and hopelessness. Meanwhile, rural widows are walking long hours to reach home before the 7pm curfew, after rising before dawn and walking those same long hours to temporary markets in the hope of earning 100 shillings. Enough, with luck, to put a single meal on the table for children who have been at home for more than four weeks.

The heavy impact of the closure of Kenyan schools is a story yet to be told. Over the past month, our rural-based centre has struggled to help ever-higher numbers of walk-ins: children, orphaned and otherwise, alone and in small anxious groups; hungry widows, hoping for a plate of rice and beans. Even at Easter, prayer alone is not enough to nourish the starving. Terrible reports are coming to the Rona Foundation of the sorrows growing apace in women- and widow-headed households: tales of hunger and fear, and of pregnant teenagers prostituting themselves for 500 shillings to support their mothers. Even in these dark days of the pandemic, whenever such terrible events take place, it is somehow the woman’s sin that becomes the public story, and patriarchy protects the man.

Kenya’s places of worship are closed this Easter, for the first time in living memory, and those who lead them are inaccessible. Meanwhile, urgent questions remain unanswered. When will the church unfold its arms to us, even when its doors are closed? Has the church abandoned its front-line role as a service provider and source of emotional care for vulnerable communities? Its absence, and this silence, has left a vacuum that grassroots organisations are now battling their hardest to fill. I find myself wondering if people should begin to tithe the local groups, dispensaries and front-line activists who are keeping hope alive against all odds during this pandemic. Will the Rona Foundation’s next big funders be local worshippers? At the end of another long day, I wish I knew.

It is a reality as old as the needs we serve: grassroots organisations have pitifully limited funding, and many receive scant support of any kind from local elected leaders, corporations or wealthy well-wishers. Like so many grassroots groups, Rona finds itself in the midst of overwhelming needs, collective grief, and the triggered traumas of our widow members and the orphaned children who look to us for emotional care and practical support.

What does the Rona Centre need in these extraordinary times, you ask? We need dry food. We need hand-washing kits. We need soap-making detergents so rural women can clean and sanitise their families and their homes. Simple water and soap, like masks, have become highly sought-after commodities, but for those we support and serve, when the stark choice is between bread and hygiene the choice is unavoidable. Hunger must be prevented, and COVID-19 prevention must be left to fate.

For so many of Kenya’s rural women this Easter, the struggle now is not decent living, or social justice or gender equity, but simple survival. The impact of Covid-19 has left no choice for rural communities who traditionally had very few. Outside these homes, the pandemic rages on, with its stay-at-home order and its curfew, and the shocking police brutality that has come with it. Inside these homes, there is hunger, domestic violence in some cases, mounting debts and bills, and overwhelming fear.

As we hear of the world’s national governments and international organisations, large corporations and philanthropists stepping up their rapid response funds for the pandemic, here at the Rona Centre we can only pray that some shift will happen and help will come our way. We remain hopeful that the storm we are facing contains not only the violent turbulence of the coronavirus pandemic, but also the quiet promises of God.

We will keep on, because we must.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.