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Of all the options I weighed for how to spend my last January of college, this wasn’t one of them. “You are not God’s children!” a woman yelled at me from the back of a speeding van. She stretched her body out over the dusty pavement and flung her voice at me with a cupped palm. “We kill the press!” I stood in the middle of Africa’s largest slum with three journalists at my side and a Nikon around my neck. I should have taken a class. Instead, I flew 19 hours and landed in the middle of an international news story, lugging cameras and an audio recorder. It was Kenya’s worst political crisis in years, and two days into my journey I was running. Nairobi’s first rioters were throwing stones at me, chasing me from dirt roads, and I was ducking behind buildings clicking a camera shutter. From an unfinished concrete balcony I had watched the first smoke rising, and now, a day later, I stood under the same smoke clouds wondering how I had gotten myself into all of this. It would be months before the smoke would finally settle over Nairobi, and even longer before I could settle with my memory of it.

STAYAWAKE is a collection of photographs and audio taken during the election violence that besieged Kenya from December 28, 2007 through January 22, 2008. The story documents a respected nation on the verge of collapse, in a condition where all political and social stability has faltered. As a college student approaching graduation, I traveled to East Africa in December of 2007 for to photograph and document the lives of Sudanese refugees. Less than 24 hours after my plane touched down in Nairobi, political turmoil engulfed Kenya and the focus of the story shifted to the actively displaced around me.

This story is multimedia dialogue about the realities of the human condition and the susceptibility of even stable governments to political degeneration. The story questions the role of Western governing systems in a culturally diverse and tribally sensitive region, and is a caution toward the misunderstanding of cultural heritage and complacency in the midst of international turmoil. STAYAWAKE commands respect for the lives of those affected by the violence while demanding attention to the fragility of our collective existence.