We Are a Murmuration

no one survives alone

All of us

We are a murmuration. A moving body of cells, people, traditions, cultures .. breathing together, swarming not in chaos but in deep, responsive coordination. Like birds in flight, we depend on each other’s movements to stay aloft … to make sence…. No one survives alone in a murmuration. That’s the point.

But after so many years of trying to help the victim, the individual .. the one in need, the isolated figure on a registration form… we’ve lost sight of the murmuration. Do we even see it anymore?

In Kalobeyei and elsewhere, we are witnessing a quiet tragedy unfold. Humanitarian differentiated assistance models, designed to stretch shrinking aid budgets, has become a system that rewards isolation and penalizes cooperation. The logic is simple: those in greatest visible need get prioritized. But the consequences are f*ing devastating.

People are now hiding their mutual aid practices. Women are dismantling their chamas(support groups) just to qualify for aid. Grandmothers who have cared for entire households through Mweria …rotational labor … are told they seem “too organized” to be in need. Young men are told their Goob groups are disqualifying them from food support.

So what do they do?

They lie.

They cheat.

They erase parts of themselves.

They destroy the networks that have helped them survive drought, displacement, and death.

A man in Kakuma told us he “broke” his chama on paper … pretending it no longer exists … because he needed to prove he had no support system. A woman in Kalobeyei dissolved her rotational savings group so she could be counted as an isolated household. "I had to pretend I was alone," she said. "Even though I never have been."

And still … there are victims. Yes, there are people in deep suffering. But can we really help them alone?

Of course not.

We are not meant to be rescued in isolation.

We are meant to heal in relationship.

The murmuration … the quiet, often invisible web of mutual care, commitments, and ancestral coordination… is the foundation of resilience. When we reward only the individual victim, we collapse that web. We turn a murmuration into a freefall.

There is another way.

Let us stop penalizing care.

Let us see the murmuration, and invest in it.

Let us track not only need, but commitment.

Let us fund the patterns of mutual aid that have always been here.

Because if we truly want to support victims, we must start by recognizing: no one survives alone. And no one should have to.