Pokot Homestay Experience in Kositei: Families Reunited.

Our Journey from Marigat to Chemolingot

The road from Marigat to Chemolingot stretches for only about 63 kilometres, yet somewhere between the familiar bustle of Marigat and the vast landscapes opening towards Tiaty, distance began to mean something entirely different. What should have been an ordinary drive became, for me, a journey through beauty and memory, through places whose names still carry painful histories, and ultimately into communities quietly demonstrating what becomes possible when people who have known conflict choose to meet one another again.

As we travelled north, Baringo unfolded in that extraordinary way the Kenyan landscape sometimes does, asking nothing of you yet somehow commanding your full attention. Ostriches appeared along the road, camels moved through the dry country, rugged mountains rose against the horizon and, from a distance, Lake Bogoria occasionally revealed itself between the changing landscapes. There is something humbling about travelling through such country; human concerns can seem very small beneath those enormous skies, although the land itself carries memories that are anything but small.

That became particularly apparent when we reached Kapedo Junction.

I knew the history associated with this place, and suddenly the beauty around me became complicated. Memories of the violence and loss associated with the October 2014 massacre, and of the insecurity that affected communities across parts of the North Rift, returned with uncomfortable clarity. Looking through the window, I found myself thinking about the strange relationship between landscape and memory: a mountain remains a mountain, a road remains a road and the sun continues to rise over both, yet for people who have experienced violence there, the same beautiful place can carry grief, fear and absence for years.

Still, this journey was not undertaken to remain imprisoned in that history. In many ways, what awaited us further along the road was evidence that history, however painful, does not always have to have the final word.

After settling briefly into our rooms and leaving our luggage behind, we were soon travelling once more, this time towards Kositei Primary School along dusty, rugged terrain. I had expected a programme of activities centred on peace, sport, education and community engagement; what I had not anticipated was how deeply human the gathering would become.

At Kositei, Tugen children, parents, teachers and administrators from Tuluk, Chepkesing and Kapturo joined members of the Pokot community, bringing together people whose communities have lived through periods of mistrust and conflict but whose histories are also far more intertwined than those conflicts might suggest.

And perhaps that was one of the most important lessons of the entire visit: sometimes peace does not introduce strangers to one another; it simply allows people who have always belonged to one another to meet again.

Hosts welcoming Visitors at Kositei Primary School

When Neighbours Discover They Are Family

The homestay experience revealed this in ways no formal peacebuilding presentation ever could.

As families and children interacted, stories began emerging about connections between Tugen and Pokot families through parents and grandparents. Children who had perhaps grown up understanding the neighbouring community mainly through inherited stories of difference were discovering something wonderfully inconvenient to those old divisions: the child standing opposite them was not necessarily a stranger at all.

In some cases, children formed friendships across community lines and returned home only to discover, through conversations with their parents and grandparents, that their new friends were actually members of their extended families.

There was something profoundly moving about that discovery because it exposed the absurdity that conflict can sometimes create. People can spend years learning where one community supposedly ends and another begins, while beneath those boundaries lie marriages, friendships, trade, kinship and generations of shared history. The Tugen and Pokot communities had traded together, visited one another and shared aspects of life long before recent conflicts hardened perceptions between them; peace was therefore not creating an entirely new relationship so much as giving an older one permission to breathe again.

What Peace Looks Like When It Becomes Practical

During this visit, I was reminded that peace becomes meaningful when it leaves the language of meetings and workshops and enters ordinary life.

CPI Kenya had worked with local communities on plans to establish at least five markets across Tugen and Pokot areas, creating spaces where trade could strengthen livelihoods while regular interaction encouraged peaceful coexistence. Four of those markets have now been constructed, with the latest, Ameta Market, offering a tangible example of what can emerge when communities are able to move, meet and trade without fear.

Yet our conversations also made clear that peace alone does not remove every challenge.

For many Tugen families, farming has traditionally been central to life and livelihood, but changing weather patterns, inadequate rainfall and the wider effects of climate change have increasingly made cultivation difficult, leaving many households more dependent on goats and other livestock. Again and again, the need for water surfaced in conversations, particularly the need for irrigation that could allow families to cultivate their land more reliably, produce food and rebuild sustainable livelihoods.

It made me think differently about what we mean when we speak of peace. Peace cannot simply be measured by the absence of gunfire or conflict; its deeper value lies in what becomes possible afterwards. A market can open, a farmer can cultivate land, a child can travel to school, neighbours can trade, families can visit one another and communities can begin planning beyond tomorrow.

That is when peace stops being an abstract idea and becomes something people can actually live.

When the Actions of a Few Become the Burden of Many

One observation shared by Mr. Bukuno stayed with me long after our discussions ended. He spoke about the damage that can be caused when a small number of individuals, sometimes motivated by personal interests or greed, create conflict and then retreat behind the protection of their communities, leaving ordinary people to carry consequences they did not create.

His words raised an uncomfortable but necessary question: how often do entire communities inherit reputations created by the actions of a few?

When wrongdoing is allowed to acquire an ethnic or communal identity, suspicion spreads far beyond those responsible. Neighbours begin fearing neighbours, old relationships fracture and children may inherit stories of enemies they have never personally met. The responsibility of communities, therefore, is not merely to defend their collective identity, but also to confront behaviour within their own ranks when it threatens the wellbeing of others.

A community should never allow the actions of a few individuals to destroy the peace, dignity and future of the many.

When the School Ground Became Common Ground

Saturday the 19th brought another dimension to the experience as CPI Kenya and Sports 4 Peace joined the communities at Kositei Comprehensive School for a day of games, interaction and celebration.

Looking around the school grounds, I was struck by the diversity gathered in one place: parents, teachers, chiefs, pastors and administrators; Pokot and Tugen children; young people who had travelled from Nairobi and Kiambu County; elderly community members carrying decades of memory; youthful teachers; and students whose energy seemed capable of overcoming both the heat and the dust.

Then the games began.

Something changed when people started playing together. Laughter travelled easily across the school grounds, competition became playful, cheering erupted from different corners and, for those few hours, identities that might once have determined who could safely stand beside whom seemed considerably less important than whose team was winning.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet gifts of sport: before people have time to discuss all the reasons history has given them to remain apart, they have already passed one another a ball, laughed at somebody's mistake, celebrated a point together and discovered that joy requires very little translation.

Eventually the games ended, although nobody appeared particularly eager for them to do so, and we moved into what became one of the most revealing parts of the day: listening.

The Stories That Changed the Room

Parents began sharing experiences from the homestay programme, including those extraordinary accounts of children who had crossed community lines, made friends and later discovered that friendship had unknowingly led them back to relatives.

The young visitors from Nairobi also spoke, and their reflections revealed another kind of boundary being dismantled. For some, this was their first time visiting the area, and they admitted arriving with perceptions of the Pokot community shaped largely by what they had heard from elsewhere. The imagined Pokot person, constructed from distance and stories, was very different from the human being they eventually encountered.

What they found instead was warmth, humour, generosity and an openness that surprised them.

And then, naturally, there was the food.

The fried marumbo and goat meat earned their own place in the memories of the visit, although the significance of sharing food went beyond discovering something delicious. Sitting with people, eating what they eat, laughing at the same table and being welcomed into their space can undo assumptions that years of explanation sometimes fail to shift.

Prejudice often survives at a distance. Human encounter makes that distance much harder to maintain.

The Wealth You Cannot Count

There was something about the Pokot community that remained with me after we left, something I still struggle to describe without reducing it to sentimental language. It was a richness that had very little to do with possessions and everything to do with presence: the generosity of a welcome, the firmness of a handshake, the ease of laughter and that unmistakable feeling of being received rather than merely accommodated.

The children brought this home to me most vividly.

They were fascinated by my camera and delighted whenever photographs were taken, but the real excitement came afterwards, when they crowded around to see themselves on the screen. Watching their faces light up, I realised that for those few moments the camera had stopped being merely a device for documenting our visit. It had become a small meeting place between us, preserving their smiles while allowing them the pleasure of seeing themselves reflected back.

There are forms of wealth that statistics will never adequately capture, and perhaps some of the richest moments of this journey were precisely those that could never be entered into a project indicator.

What I Carried Home

When I think back to the road between Marigat and Chemolingot, I realise that I returned carrying far more than photographs.

The journey reminded me how deeply I love the Kenyan landscape, including its roughness: mountains rising from dry earth, animals appearing unexpectedly beside the road, dust finding its way into everything, oppressive heat and enormous skies stretching beyond what the eye can hold. It also reminded me that I am perhaps more comfortable with discomfort than I sometimes imagine, because once the people and stories at the end of the road become important enough, rough roads and heat cease to feel like inconveniences.

More importantly, however, the journey forced me to think again about fear, memory and the extraordinary capacity of human beings to reconnect.

We had travelled through places whose names still evoke violence and arrived among communities that know what division costs. Yet what confronted us was not the past repeating itself. We encountered children playing across community lines, parents exchanging stories, teachers and administrators building relationships, young people questioning assumptions they had carried with them, families rediscovering relatives and communities creating markets through which peace could become livelihood.

Somewhere along those 63 kilometres, I began to understand that reconciliation is rarely one dramatic moment in which everybody suddenly agrees to forget what happened. More often, it grows quietly through repeated acts of courage: allowing your child to sleep in another community's home, welcoming someone whose people you were once taught to fear, sharing food, opening a market, playing together, listening to an old story differently or discovering that the person standing on the other side of an inherited boundary is, quite literally, family.

The distance from Marigat to Chemolingot can be measured easily on a map, but the journey we witnessed cannot.

It travelled through landscape and memory, through wounds that communities still remember and relationships they are slowly reclaiming, and somewhere between Kapedo Junction, Kositei and the homes that opened their doors to strangers, it became a journey towards something much larger than any programme or project.

It became a journey back to one another.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest fruits peace can produce: not simply the end of conflict, but the return of ordinary human possibilities — children learning together, families visiting again, people trading without fear, communities imagining a future together and, after years of being taught where the boundaries lie, recognising themselves in one another once more.