Back to the Land, Warily

Meanwhile, the army trucks loaded with farmers are headed to areas where the difficult task of reconciliation has barely gotten underway, and many people worry that the returnees will be chased away again in coming months.

"Peace does not come because police are there -- reconciliation is a process and we need more time," said Joseph Mwangi, a pastor and chairman of a camp in Cherangany, where about 500 people headed back to their farms last week. "But if they're not on their farms now, we'll not have food in 2009. We need them to go back and start planting."

It was around 3 p.m., and people in the last group that day to head home were rolling up the white tents where they have lived for the past five months. They packed up the new hoes and the government-provided seeds -- intended to provide a crop in three months rather than the usual nine -- and heaved it all onto an idling army truck.

Though there were people who were happy to be going home, Agnes Kerubo was not one of them.

Like others, she had not been back to her farm since she was attacked in daylight by neighbors with bows and arrows and machine guns, people she once trusted and who still live just a five-minute walk from her place.

She had a week's worth of yellow peas and corn flour rations and a couple of burlap sacks of belongings.

"I don't have a house, because they burned it down," Kerubo said, adding that there was one reason the politicians who had abandoned them for months were now paying attention. "They are pressuring us to go and cultivate because our area is the central source of food."

"We are late" for planting, she said. "But we will try."

She climbed into the truck with a few dozen of her neighbors. As people from the camp waved, the farmers headed away on an orange dirt road into the green hills of the Rift Valley, which by themselves tell the story of the dire predicament.

The truck passed fallow field after fallow field, acres that should be waist-high with corn by now. It rumbled by land just tilled, perhaps two months late, and farms half planted and half weedy. There were crumbling remains of burned houses along the way, and clusters of young men who did not wave but just stared as their returning neighbors passed.

At the top of a hill, the truck finally stopped at the old colonial farm called Geta. The farmers, originally from a different region, had bought it as a collective decades ago.

They paused a moment to pray, then Agnes Kerubo and the others climbed out.