VOA标准英语201--Ahead of Kenyan Elections, Some Take Precautions

 

Ahead of Kenyan Elections, Some Take Precautions

Kenyans around the country are preparing for Monday’s elections, and the possibility of violence afterward¹.

Hip-hop artist Moroko Lenakore lives in Kibera, one of Nairobi’s largest slums, and a center of post-election violence in early 2008.

“They were throwing stones at the riot police and so stones would hit our windows," he says. "It was scary at night. If they are crazy during the day, you can imagine at night."

Many homes in Kibera were looted and burned down.

"The equipment is usually here," he says, opening the door to a small room in his house. "But now we’ve moved it away because we don’t know what might happen, people might come looting."

Lenakore is sending his 13-year-old sister to stay with family in western Kenya, where most of Kibera’s residents come from.

It is a pre-election exodus² to ancestral homelands many Kenyans will make.

Winnie Kashoka, a Kikuyu shopkeeper in the Luo-dominated city of Kisumu in western Kenya, says she will return to her birthplace of Nyeri on Monday, before the election results are announced.

Most of her clients are Luo and she considers them her trusted friends.

"If you have been good to them, then surely they cannot rise up and fight you," she says. 

But ethnic³ tensions in lakeside Kisumu surface during election season.

Most Kikuyus fled the city in 2007, after it was announced that President Mwai Kibaki, also a Kikuyu, had won that year's presidential vote.

Kashoka returned months later.

"Going around Kisumu as a whole was not easy," she says. "You are still not comfortable. You don’t know the feelings of people still around, whether they still had bitterness with you people."

Residents fear Kisumu could once again erupt if Raila Odinga, a Luo, loses the upcoming election.

Dipak Upadhyay, who owns a stationery⁴ store on Kisumu’s main drag, remembers the post-election violence five years ago.

“With heavy forces, they were looted," he says. "I am the one who was lucky. They didn’t touch my shop because nearby is an electronics shop, so they targeted there first.”

Upadhyay says the police did little to stop the looters. This time, he has formed a vigilante night patrol with his fellow Asian businessmen.

"Before it used to be really high — the crime level," he says. "Since we started, it’s gone down."

The candidates are pledging peace, but Kenyans in former hotspots want to make sure they don't get caught up in violence a second time. 

1 afterward   

adv.后来；以后

参考例句：

• Let's go to the theatre first and eat afterward. 让我们先去看戏，然后吃饭。
• Afterward,the boy became a very famous artist.后来，这男孩成为一个很有名的艺术家。

2 exodus   

v.大批离去，成群外出

参考例句：

• The medical system is facing collapse because of an exodus of doctors.由于医生大批离去，医疗系统面临崩溃。
• Man's great challenge at this moment is to prevent his exodus from this planet.人在当前所遇到的最大挑战，就是要防止人从这个星球上消失。

3 ethnic   

adj.人种的，种族的，异教徒的

参考例句：

• This music would sound more ethnic if you played it in steel drums.如果你用钢鼓演奏，这首乐曲将更具民族特色。
• The plan is likely only to aggravate ethnic frictions.这一方案很有可能只会加剧种族冲突。

4 stationery   

n.文具；(配套的)信笺信封

参考例句：

• She works in the stationery department of a big store.她在一家大商店的文具部工作。
• There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.文具一多，心里自会觉得踏实。