ELDORET, Kenya (Reuters) - When a mob of his neighbors tried to kill Philip Nderitu, he ran from his home in western Kenya to sleep outside a police station.
He knew his family would be spared the rocks and machetes of his attackers because his wife was a Luhya, a tribe seen as pro-opposition.
But their home was ransacked as post-election violence convulsed the country's lush Rift Valley after the December 27 polls, and he had no idea where his loved ones had fled.
Almost a month later, they were reunited.
"I am so happy," the 48-year-old night guard said, hugging his five sons after Red Cross workers brought them together at a camp for nearly 13,000 people uprooted by the bloodshed.
The displaced here, like Nderitu, are members of President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe, chased out of villages around Eldoret town by gangs of youths from the Kalenjin tribe they call "warriors". Hundreds of families were split up in the chaos.
As Nderitu's family talked excitedly, 19 pictures in a nearby window -- some bleached by the fierce sun -- showed mournful-looking children holding numbered pieces of paper.
"Do You Know These Kids?" read a sign, translated into Swahili "Unajua Hawa Watoto?"
SHOCK
The site of the camp, Eldoret Showgrounds, is more used to hosting a national agricultural fair each March.
But this year's event is in doubt as the field is filled with row upon row of white tents and lined on one side by scores of makeshift pit latrines fenced with plastic.
In a small medical clinic, local doctors measure children at risk of malnutrition by a table topped with a thermometer, pages of handwritten lists and a red and white loudhailer.
In quieter corners, counselors talk to shocked adults about the atrocities they have seen.
More than 1,500 children attend primary school in the camp, some of whom wear uniforms and carry notebooks and pencils. But most people sit looking stunned, many on empty aid agency buckets as they wait for donations of maize.
While the food is handed out, a group of women huddles by the pictures of the unclaimed children. One thinks she has found a niece lost in the panic when a mob torched a church near Eldoret on January 1, killing 30 people.
But the photograph of the girl -- one of the youngest there, pictured in front of a Kenyan flag -- is not her, and the woman sobs as she is led away by her friends.
"We are joyful when we trace families," says Sister Sebi, a local volunteer wearing a Red Cross waistcoat over a bright polka dot dress. "Others, we just have to console."
http://www.reuters.com/article/world...60143220080124 http://www.reuters.com/article/world...BrandChannel=0
Families seek loved ones lost in Kenya crisis 
Linear Mode
