If the current violence in Kenya continues indefinitely, Father James Kimani Kairu won't be able to go home again to the land his mother bought and worked hard for.

"We are refugees in our own country," the priest said Jan.15, two weeks after the results of a Dec. 27 national election set off looting, burning and killing in his homeland.

Father Kairu, 37, is living at St. David Parish in Richmond while studying at the Jesuit School of Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

His mother, Margaret Muthoni, has been displaced from the home and little farm she bought in the 1980s from her "small salary as a primary schoolteacher" after the death of her husband. "She built a small two-bedroom house where we were all brought up," said Father Kairu.

Besides teaching, the priest's mother cultivated the land with her hands and a hoe every day and then sold the harvest "so all six of us children could go to the university," he said.

Although press reports attribute the violence to a dishonest election process, Father Kairu has a different view of the situation.

In e-mail and telephone interviews with The Catholic Voice, Oakland diocesan newspaper, he said: "Even a fool will see that it is something deeper than election-rigging. Hundreds of warriors have descended on our village as they flatten all the homes of Kikuyus," members of the tribe to which the priest belongs.

Ethnic Kikuyus have dominated Kenya's political and economic life since independence from Britain in 1963. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki is a Kikuyu, while challenger Raila Odinga belongs to the Luo tribe.

Rival tribes claim that the ancestral land belonging to the priest's family is actually their own land --- "so we must move, together with all those who belong to my tribe, who like my mother got the properties legally and from hard work."

Father Kairu said the accusers' belief that Kibaki stole votes has meant that "our sentence is to have our homes burnt down and displaced."

He believes the time has come for Kenyans to come together under the banner of their homeland instead of their tribal identities. "I don't want my people to be referred to as Kikuyus, but as Kenyans. Those who voted for either of the candidates are Kenyans. The candidates are Kenyans too, and should not be made to suffer because of the corrupt electoral process created by politicians."

Father Kairu said the ongoing rancor has resulted in stereotyping among different tribes and this is causing people to act violently. "When I was back home, neighbors who sat together in church would organize to kill members of another tribe," he said.

How could this happen? "Because Catholic Christian Kenyans think mainly in terms of a tribal context, and that defeats the whole message of Christianity," he said.

Kenya's upheaval has adversely affected not only his mother, but other family members as well. Father Kairu recently appealed to Massgoers at St. David's for financial help in getting his mother, an aunt, nine other family members, and a group of neighbors away from Eldoret, where the violence has been especially vicious.

St. David's parishioners responded to Father Kairu's plea by giving $2,500. Part of the money was paid to get 40 individuals to the local airport in a covered flatbed truck and several buses. Muthoni had to wait at the airport for 12 hours to catch a flight to Nairobi, where another son lives.

"At the moment she is alive and safe," the priest said in a Jan. 13 phone interview. But he fears she will never be able to return to Eldoret.

Father Kairu is spending many hours on his cell phone talking to his brother about finding another home for their mother in a safer area. "She has nothing --- no clothes or furniture. She left everything behind," he said.

---CNS