Wandering Gaia

Roots of the problem

November 10, 2009 by Gaia

Famine and Africa seem so synonymous that it’s almost not worth questioning the relationship. As East Africa reels from one of its worst droughts in living memory and enters into what looks likely to be an El Nino calamity, I wonder how things might be different. The biggest problem most African nations face, Peter Okoth tells me, is the lack of government subsidies for agriculture.

In the 1970s, the IMF and World Bank convinced African leaders to remove government subsidies for farmers on the logic that the free market would drive production. With UK farmers getting 55% subsidies, Australian 45%, Japan 40%, and so on, what this did was massively disadvantage African farmers. A Kenyan farmer pays four times as much as a US farmer for a litre of fertilizer, for example. (There is no fertilizer production on the continent, so it is all imported, adding to its cost.) Without subsidies, farmers can’t afford bad years, plant less and are crippled by debts from loans just to buy seeds. The cost of fertilizers have risen fourfold in the past year because petrol prices have soared.

Three years ago, the Malawi president, who being minister for agriculture, took a keen interest, failed to secure international loans and aid and so decided to introduce subsidies for farmers- the first sub-Saharan country to do so. Agricultural production rose 500% in those farmers included in the pilot project (nearly half of all farmers), they have closed the grain gap from 8 months (time during which the granary stores are empty) to two months, and some have 2 months’ surplus. In going against the World Bank, Malawi has created a production level that now enables it to sell maize to Zimbabwe and Kenya, unthinkable four years ago.

Kenya is now making noises in the same direction, but with an administration mired in corruption and with a President, who has so many other things higher up in his mind, the scheme is unlikely to be as successful. For a start, it’s not clear how subsidies will be administered and who will receive them. The government this week doubled the agricultural budget from 4% to 8%, though. It’s still shy of the 10% ‘Millennium Goals’ that governments agreed in 2006, but it’s something. And in a country where crops are almost exclusively rainfed, the government is making noises about improving irrigation.

It’s a long, slow, painful process, although much-needed. Deforestation and environmental degradation have made much of this vast land unsuitable for agriculture, rains have leeched away minerals and nutrients and erosion and salination plague formerly lush forests. But regeneration is possible, even in the most hostile environments. Okoth is a scientist working on the Below Ground Biodiversity Programme at the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute, part of the World Agroforestry Centre. His offices are set in lush gardens opposite the United Nations buildings, 20 minutes and a world away from the smoggy chaos of central Nairobi. Okoth’s topic of research is soil – what’s in it that plants like, how to make it more amenable to roots and resistant to disease. He identifies fungi and bacteria that help to fix the nitrogen, that plants need for growth, to their roots and encourages roots to frow more filaments faster. Using nitrogen-fixing microbes means farmers can get away with adding less fertilisers, which is cheaper and less polluting. It’s more efficient too – planting promiscuous soybean (a crop that enhances nitrogen-fixing) can concentrate up tp 120 kg of nitrogen per hectare of soil, which is far better than industrial fertilisers. He finds other organisms that cure or prevent diseases like blight in crops like maize. He can turn dust into a thriving nutritious ecosystem.

One example of this is in a former mine near Mombasa, where his team has turned a rocky impenetrable ground into a thriving ecosystem. First, they planted a few pine trees, he says, then they created a carpet of needles on which they introduced a few earthworms. The worms created soil and other plants could grow. I haven’t seen the plot, but it sounds interesting. Whether schemes like this can be repeated throughout the country is another question. Underpinning every effort like this is a team of NGOs, research scientists or small community. But they face enormous challenges from government incompetence, poverty, lack of education and traditional practices of charcoal burning and over grazing.

Sometimes, it seems to me like the only solution is for a small body of scientists, including a hydrogeologist, agricultural expert, biologist, meteorologist and ecologist to come together and without interference from social, economic or political factions, look at the entire African continent and draw up a crop, forestation, mangrove and grassland planting strategy according to water availability and climate. I wonder what Africa would look like. My guess is there would be no more starvation – the continent could feed us all and still have room for its wildlife. But perhaps I’m wrong.

One thing is certain, we’ve had enough of Nairobi. We’ll head east to the coast.

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South to Nairobi

November 10, 2009 by Gaia

Determined not to make the same mistake as before, Nick and I make sure we have two water bottles as we head off on the perilous journey south to Nairobi. As we wait to leave, Fabio carrying outlast-minute checks on the vehicle, the car is mobbed as it always is when we are stationary, by dozens of kids, who clamber an and around us, fire questions at us, gasp at Nick’s tattoos and generally regard us as the travelling circus come to town. Their favourite part of the car by a long way is the wing mirrors, which hold bizarre fascination for children and adults alike, who grab at the mirrors, almost yanking them off and peer at themselves pulling various faces and expressions until they are shoved out of the way by another’s face. Nick spends much of the journey readjusting wing mirrors after every stop so that Fabio can use them while he’s driving.

We head off, after much negotiating, with a cargo of Turkana women and their filled-up water cans to save them the 35 km walk back to their village. They are delighted with this rare ride and entertain us by belting out songs for the journey. But Fabio is sombre. He checks the mirrors continually, worried about the white smoke gusting out of the exhaust. We’re burning oil.

We arrive at the village, where the women and their water are unloaded and we are greeted warmly like returning friends. This is the village we passed yesterday and bought incense from, and where the goats had been stolen by a neighbouring tribe. We ask about the goats, but the warriors have not yet returned. The schoolteacher shows me the three small bags of grain he has to feed all the children, donated by the mission. It’s not much.

Fabio is anxious to get going – we have a long journey ahead and it’s already afternoon. We say our goodbyes and head on. After a few hundred kilometres, the road forks and we take the smaller track. Fabio explains that the main track is plagued by banditry. “Men with guns shoot at the cars and steal everything,” he says. Besides, the small track is shorter. I wonder why everyone else doesn’t take the smaller track – although, by ‘everyone else’, I’m not sure to whom I’m referring; we’ve only passed one other vehicle and it was an army jeep. “Most cars can’t come this way because of the hill,” Fabio says.

Within 50 kilometres, I see what he means. Our LandRover has crossed two creeks – one of which seemed scarily deep – with no problem at all, and is trundling across boulders of rock, when the track seems to disappear. Fabio shifts to first gear and we quite literally climb a near-vertical, sheer rock face. The engine revs and the chassis creaks in complaint, but for at least one kilometre we climb the mountain of rock, while I hold my breath and wonder if we’ll crash backwards and down. Even donkeys would balk at this route, so I have no idea how we manage to seemingly overcome the laws of physics, but eventually we are at the top and the only way is down.

The white smoke and the smell of burning oil has become stronger during the journey and Fabio is anxious that it is a sign that the piston rings have worn down, causing oil to leak and the bore to rub against the piston. Nick reckons it’s a broken valve seal. I have no idea, but I can tell from everybody’s expressions that it’s not good. There are no mechanics out here. Fabio knows an Indian LandRover enthusiast who lives in a village on the other route, but it is unlikely he’d have the part we need. It’s about this time that a problem develops with the brakes, which nobody can fathom.

For the moment, we carry on driving. Night is falling and Fabio tries in vain to call the mission at Barseloi to ask if we can stay the night. In the end, we just turn up.

It’s a beautiful house built by Italian missionaries 15 years ago, with a huge veranda that runs right the way around it, and in a lovely position on the top of a hill overlooking the village with a small path leading to the nunnery. The two fathers, one Columbian, one from Bolivia, greet us warmly and welcome us inside for dinner. They hastily rearrange what was clearly intended to be a modest dinner for two into a meal for all five of us, generously sharing their little among us all. It’s a lovely dinner and the priests are all great friends, I see, all young and drawn closer together in solidarity over the harsh lives they lead. All have been shot at, faced angry tribal groups and the frustration of seeing their labours destroyed, from the schools they build being burned down, to children they have helped nurture and educate being killed by conflict, disease or malnutrition. They chat to us, laughing good-naturedly at the mistakes I make in my rusty Spanish. I accidentally say rude words, which produces guffaws. Fabio explains how he, when invited by a friendly Muslim man for dinner, a couple of years ago, spent the whole evening complimenting his wife on her lovely vagina until, during an after-dinner stroll in the garden, the husband explained that although the Swahili for ‘dinner’ and ‘vagina’ are similar, there is a crucial difference that he was missing. Mortified, Fabio now skirts around the word ‘dinner’ in Swahili conversation.

During his two month visit to a mission in London to learn English, Fabio slipped up in English too. He delivered a Christmas speech on the behest of his hosts, about the Three Wise Men and their treasures. “Joseph cried: ‘Open your trousers and reveal your gift…’,” he announced, not expecting the sudden laughter. Even in the telling, Fabio pronounces treasures and trousers almost indistinguishably. These are funny little trompes of the tongue, not at all like the misunderstandings that lead one tribe to feel that the mission is favouring another tribe when it builds a school, and so burns it down.

We are shown to our room – “careful of scorpions in the bathroom” – and warned to use the mosquito nets. A couple of years ago, an Italian priest staying here alone, contracted cerebral malaria and, with his car broken-down and no way of calling for help, died horribly. Fabio sleeps with his ghost – just one more of the many casualties of life out here that we hear about.

Next morning, Fabio is checking the car, which seems to have righted itself of the white smoke problem over night – although not the brake one. We stroll over to the Sisters’ building and are greeted with two young Columbian and one Ecuadorian sister, broad smiles and neatly pressed habits. They produce freshly baked bread and jostle and tease Fabio till he blushes. We have coffee and hear more extraordinary tales of life out here before we head back to the Brothers, where our breakfast waits. The priests are getting ready to head to their distant communities to deliver cholera medication – there is quite an epidemic around here at the moment, killing babies and old people mainly.

We have a bowl of the most delicious creamy acacia honey I’ve tasted. There’s a small bird here known as the honey bird, which drinks the honey. But it can’t get past the fierce bees to get its tipple, so it’s developed a relationship with the honey badger, a small mammal that also likes honey but which doesn’t know where it is. The bird shows the badger where to find the honey, flying a little way ahead of it to guide it. The badger then raids the hive, driving off the scary bees, so that both bird and badger can drink their fill. Some local people have learned to watch the badger and the honey bird to find the honey. And the bird has realised that people are faster and smarter than the badger, driving the bees off with smoke, and so the bird now calls to these people and takes them directly to the honey, bypassing the poor badger. The mission priests here are working with the locals to encourage honey collecting so the villagers can trade it in Nairobi for what is becoming a growing livelihood, helping families whose animals have died.

Before 8, it’s already time to leave and bid goodbye to these lovely priests and nuns – we’re going to try to make it down to Nairobi by tonight. We head off, full-bellied, watered and well-slept. The car appears to be behaving itself and all is good. We drive for a few hours, spotting giraffes and zebras, ostriches and baboons. Before long, though, we’re back to scanning the road for would-be assassins. This is a stretch where the Borana tribespeople often attack, Fabio says. Soon after, we get a puncture. It’s too risky to stop here, Fabio tells us, so we judder along a kilometre or so to the entrance gates of the national park, where a couple of armed guards stand duty. While we change the tyre under the watchful gaze of the guards, Fabio repeatedly tells us how lucky we are that the tyre burst here and not a few hundred metres further up the track, where there would have been nothing we could have done. The tribes are no longer a problem further up, but the reason for this, it transpires, is that their patch of violent activity has been taken by a bigger menace: banditry.

As we continue on our nervous way, Fabio driving faster than usual, he says that the bandits on this raod are so bad, that when the government minister came from Nairobi in a convoy with the chief of police to assess the problem a few months ago, the entire cavalcade was held by bandits that took everything and left the minister standing in the road with only his clothes. Priests’ cars are often attacked, he says, as I try to focus on the lesser problem of the brake fault. When we stopped, Nick tied a shoelace to secure the wobbly brake line in place, which we hope has helped.

Every few kilometres along the road, a newly erected camp of army tents stands like a welcome totem of law and order. They were not here a few weeks ago, Fabio says. I hope that this very visible army presence is enough to thwart our would-be attackers, but as Nick and I filter shapes out of the landscape in a now familiar way, searching for gun-carrying men and boys, and of these, trying to pick out the ones who mean us harm, nothing is certain. After a few long hours, Fabio announces that the danger is now over, we are unlikely to get attacked from here on, he says, at a point indiscernible from the road before.

We shrug off some anxiety and the next half hour passes more easily and soon we are in Nyahururu, a small, unfreindly feeling town with few smiles and a dusty desolation. Fabio gets cellphone reception and he calls the mission here to ask them if we can have lunch there. It’s after 2, and the priests there have already eaten but they say they can rustle something up. This is an Italian mission, and they know how to eat! We have delicious marinated beef, real olive oil and balsamic vinegar, tomatoes, toast and parmesan. We can’t believe our luck, wolfing it down greedily. The Italian priest is a man in his 70s, the first old priest we’ve seen and the first that fits my preconceptions of what priests look like. He came out here in his 20s and has lived longer here than in Italy, where he no longer fits in – “don’t understand many of the words people use there now and how they use them Things there have changed so much”. I tell him that the north and Milan, where he comes from, has probably changed far more than the south, and he could maybe try going there. “But what would be the point?” he asks. “My life is in Kenya.”

It’s strange, this army of missionaries, who spend their lives here and yet are not Kenyan and never will be. They belong nowhere but without them, who would feed these hungry people that the government has abandoned?

We leave the Italian and continue south, passing the Equator marker with excitement. There is a bucket and funnel at the base of the marker: pour water down the funnel and it spins clockwise on one side of the marker and anticlockwise on the other. Two sides of our enormous globe, an invisible line taking us from the rich monetary wealth and developed, rich ‘ice-creams’ of the north, to the resource-rich, mineral wealth, but poorly governed human poverty of the ‘ice-cream cones’ of the south.

We journey on, past Mount Kenya (Formerly Africa’s highest mountain), past Lake Naivasha, playground of rich expats and home to the country’s vast export flower industry. Rows of polythene greenhouses fill the landscape like the worst of southern Spain’s Almeria, and the pesticides and fertilisers used, destroy life in the lake. One of the biggest ethical issues though, is that this area is one of Kenya’s most fertile, and instead of growing crops for the nation’s many hungry people, it is growing lilies for sale in supermarkets in England and elsewhere.

We pass refugee camps for displaced people, still homeless after last year’s post-election violence, which saw ordinary people, including children, murdered in the streets by the police and army. While Washington steps up diplomatic pressure and the international community begins the slow process of investigating the horrors, President Mwai Kibake protests these incursions into his sovereignty and talks up his anti-corruption measures, such as new rules saying that all presidential cars must be of the same modest model, doing away with the Hummers and other ridiculous vehicles ministers treat themselves to. It is not enough. Kenyans I talk to can’t wait to see the back of Kibake and his crew, who overstayed their welcome (in stereotypical African style) soon after his 2002 election victory. He will be forced out now, people tell us, but nothing is certain in politics, particularly here.

The brakes continue to play up, and as night falls we become aware of yet another crisis – the headlights keep turning themselves off. We drive for short sections with the road illuminated and are then plunged into darkness, Fabio shielding his eyes from the oncoming trucks’ full-beam headlights. It’s terrifying – the driving and the pot-holed roads are bad enough without this new danger. After a time, we pull into a service station on the outskirts of Nairobi, exhausted. It transpires that part of the problem with the lights’ dimness when they do illuminate is that they are covered with a thick layer of mud. We wash off the worst and continue of to Nairobi, grateful for the traffic jams that reduce everyone’s speed and light the streets.

We arrive at our guesthouse weary but full of admiration and respect for our lovely new friend Fabio – parting from him is difficult after sharing such an adventure, but he has his mission to go to. We wash and get a cab to the upmarket White suburb of Westlands, with its smart colonial houses and vast gardens, to meet an old friend from London, David Cohen (who’s holidaying out here), for dinner. The food is great, although expensive, it’s lovely to see Dave, and I even have a glass of wine – decadence! He’s visiting his brother who moved here recently, and tells us that although the houses are fantastic here, they are like prisons, armed and with people too scared to come and go without protection. The residents know that no one will visit them after dark because of car-jacking, so dinner parties are off. They have guests only for Sunday lunch – strange life.

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At the Jade Sea

November 7, 2009 by Gaia

Over a much-needed, late breakfast, we tell the two other priests living there a little about the journey and I confess that with the fuel situation, I feared we wouldn’t make it at all. “The light came on at the village?” Father Andrew Ndirangu, checks. “You shouldn’t have been able to drive further than 10 kilometres like that, and Loyangalani is 35 kilometres. The Lord was working miracles,” he concludes.

We didn’t even realise we had so little fuel, I explain, because the dial on the second tank read nearly one-quarter full.

Ah, the revelation! The fuel-warning light comes on and stays on once the first tank is empty, no matter how much is in the second tank, Andrew says. We had enough fuel to get here all along and I had been worrying over nothing.

The priests disappear after breakfast for fatherly duties, and Nick and I wander around the mission. It’s set in a cool, shady courtyard with trees and well-tended flowers. An outbuilding at the back contains hammocks and a television, powered by solar panels and a wind turbine. It’s cool and breezy here because unlike the main concrete building, it’s made using local materials like a larger version of the stick and palm huts. Rounding a palm grove, we come across the mission’s swimming pool! It’s heated naturally from the volcanic spring water and I remove my shoes and jump in fully clothed. We float around and let the past days’ journey and mud wash off us. The mud proves more tenacious and the hours spent digging our car out of the river have stained my shirt and trousers terracotta. It takes a lot of scrubbing, but I wash the worst out, lay my clothes on a rock to dry in minutes, and then bathe luxuriously.

After lunch, we wander around the town, which is 80% peopled by Turkana, with some Somalis, who are the businessmen here, some Samburu and a few other tribal groups. People are generally friendly, beautifully decorated, the women wearing elaborate beaded necklace collars, and there is a lot of red about – the Turkanas’ favourite colour. The recent cholera epidemic is contained here now, but the priests still distribute antibiotics and the much-needed food parcels here and to the outlying villages.

The mission has built a number of schools here and in local villages, and is trying to educate girls in particular, knowing that an educated woman ensures that her children attend school. One way they try to encourage attendance is by providing at least one free meal to every child. Many girls can’t attend, because their parents won’t let them, fearing that they will get pregnant at school or worse, be too educated for marriage, jeopardising a dowry. The mission runs evening classes for married girls, some as young as 10, where there is also a free meal, but it’s difficult for many women to attend.

I am generally fairly sceptical about the benefits of education projects in places like this – it seems to me that a Euro-centric concept of education, where kids are removed from traditional learning environments, where they attain skills in, say animal husbandry or farming, to teach them outdated, inane passages from a tired textbook on subjects that bear no relevance to their lives, is socially and individually damaging. It equips young people for a life in urban slums and shanty towns, even if a tiny few may make it into a rewarding profession. Anyway, I’ve written about this before. The point is, that here, by the shores of Lake Turkana, I feel the opposite. These people lead such very hard lives, and it feels as if I am watching the beginnings of the end of a way of life that goes back centuries.

The nomadic pastoralist lifestyle is surely coming to an end. The people here do not think so, they tell me that there has always been drought and that the rains will come and it will be better. But for how long can this arid land sustain this growing number of people? Drought is becoming more frequent, rains rarer and less reliable, the lake is shrinking, the earth becoming saltier, and the people more. The Kenyan population, more than half of whom are children, has doubled in the past 20 years, even if HIV has slowed its growth recently.

So, I think anything that helps prepare people for a different lifestyle, empowers women and gives them an opportunity for another livelihood has got to be a good thing. Turkana children who learn to read and write here are much less likely to be married before they are 20, are more likely to earn something for the family and are more likely to have children who wash their hands. Once educated, Turkanas have found jobs as nurses, teachers, mechanics, in the army and business. But a girl who is educated will be worth less for a dowry, so resistance is strong.

I meet Isabella, who speaks excellent English and went to secondary school for two years until she could no longer afford it (only primary school is free in Kenya). She is 20 and has two small children. She practices her English with us for a short time, until we are hassled by two boys who say that they were extras in the Constant Gardener film, which was shot here, and for a tidy sum, they will show us a place where it was filmed. We decline, but they persist in following us and telling us that people will throw rocks at us if they do not accompany us, until we feel so harangued that we return to the mission to escape.

Back at the mission, Fabio is fixing the spare part he collected in Isiolo to his LandRover. He crawls out from under the car and tells us that the widows are going fishing, if we want to join them. We bundle into the car with the widows in the back and a couple of kids and set off for the lake. These are women who have lost their husbands to tribal conflict and have to feed their kids somehow. “At first,” Fabio says, “they would come to the mission everyday and beg for food, So we decided to give them fishing nets and teach them how to fish.”

It was a shaky start – women just don’t fish in Turkana culture. It is considered beneath men to fish, and the refuge of the desperate, but woman are just too weak and stupid to carry out something as complicated as fishing. But, with a few false starts, it turned out that not only were the women more than capable of fishing, but that they were producing surplus to their needs. They stopped begging from the mission, and instead came for advice on how to sell their fish. They are now making a nice earning selling their fish to punters in Lake Victoria.

When I point out that it all sounds a bit like selling coals to Newcastle – in Lake Victoria, surely they have enough fish? Fabio tells me that Turkana fish is prized because Victoria fish is for export and it’s much more expensive than Turkana fish. That’s the market for you. The fish is dried and salted and taken to a holding shed, where it waits for the weekly truck that travels down from Ethiopia to Lake Victoria, via the village.

Our car, full of singing Turkanas once more, makes a bumpy journey down to the shore over boulders that seem insurmountable. Fishing with the widows is postponed, because when we get to the lake it turns out that the nets are all broken from crocodiles attacks. The lake, which is 200 kilometres by 40 kilometres, is home to crocs, hippos, flamingos, pelicans and more. But the widows, who range in age from 16 to 35, lose no time in stripping off and going into the lake for a swim. They splash Fabio and Nick mercilessly – I decide the water is far too cold for a swim – and then we head back to the mission, where Father Andrew is disappointed in our lack of catch.

No matter, we still have telapia for dinner, and it’s delicious. While the Turkana locals eat only meat, milk and blood – they pierce and artery in a goat’s neck and drain it into a cup before pinching the vessel closed until it clots into a seal – there are fruits and vegetables at the mission brought from the outskirts of Nairobi. The local people don’t even eat cheese “because it is like soap”.

Andrew professes that tilapia is the only fish one can eat in Kenya, because the fish in Victoria is exported. I point out that Mombasa and the rest of the coast provide a lot of fish.” Oh but that is fish from the sea. It is not good to eat,” he replies. I ask him what is wrong with it, and he says that it comes from the sea so it is salty. I point out that the fish from Turkana is dried and salted.

Then he says ominously: “Some fish in the sea have both eyes on one side of their head.” And that ends the matter.

The next day, we have to return to Nairobi, because Fabio has decided that the short route (which e took on the way up) is too dangerous because of the tribal tensions, so we must go a longer route back and he needs to pick up his sister from Nairobi airport in a couple of days. We will make the journey in two stages, though, and start after lunch, Fabio says.

It is Sunday today, so we must go to the next village, so Fabio can do mass in the church there. The village belongs to the smallest tribe in Kenya, the El Moro, who number about 50, although many have intermarried with Samburu, so it’s hard to know whether there are any ‘true’ El Moro left. This is one of the only fishing tribes in Kenya – the men take log rafts and boats out and pull in fish that can be as much as 100 kilos in weight, like Nile perch. Like the widows of Loyangalani, they dry and salt the fish for sale in Lake Victoria. All the transactions can be made using m-Pesa, by mobile phone. I even catch site of one warrior, who has a solar-powered mobile in his hand. And one of the straw huts in the village has two solar panels on its roof.

Mass is conducted with much beautiful, harmonious singing, wafting of incense and plenty of curious glances our way. Fabio introduces us at the end and we talk to a few people, using him as a translator. The children here, and adults, have deformed bones and teeth. Fabio thinks it is because they are drinking water straight from the lake. It could be that one of the minerals dissolved in the water is preventing the people here from absorbing calcium, I say.

Child mortality is high here. Women have 6 or 7 children and losing a child is normal and an accepted part of life, we are told. Nick draws out a diagram of a simple distillation system that would enable them to purify the lake water. It involves digging a lined pit with a small container placed within. Over the top is sheet of plastic, held in place with stones, and weighted in the middle, over the container, with a stone. Water poured into the pit will evaporate as the sun heats the plastic, condense onto the underside of the sheet and then drip down into the container because of the depression made by the stone.

Fabio, asks lots of questions and shows a woman from the village. Together, they pore over his drawing. We will try it, they say.

We return to the mission for lunch, which Fabio misses, because he is again under the LandRover, fixing it before our journey south.

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Lake Turkana (part 2)

November 7, 2009 by Gaia

Spirits high and feeling surprisingly refreshed with our water bottles refilled, we set off from the South Horr mission ready for the adventures a new day holds. It’s early but already warm and we’re driving slower to conserve our little fuel. At this speed, we pick out animals more easily. Dik diks stand in our path, feeing at the last minute with exaggeratedly startled eyes. “Mmm, good to eat,” says Fabio.

We pass two beautiful, ornate sort of grouse, indigo coloured with a small comb. “They’re lovely,” I say.

“Yes, very nice,” Fabio agrees. “Better even than chicken.” I realise that Fabio sees the wildlife here more as items on a picture menu than as zoological curios. Even the donkeys here are pretty cool – they have been interbreeding with zebras. I can well imagine that a donkey would be bowled over by the prettiness of a stripy zebra, perhaps it goes some way to mollifying it over the realisation that the only song it will ever produce is that terrible baying noise. Nick and I decide the males are zonkeys and the females are debras. They have a stripe across their shoulders, prettier ears and, sometimes, decorative stripes on their ankles too.

Every few miles, we are overcome by the terrible stench of rotting flesh. At the edge of the road, a camel, cow or goat will be there, identifiable only by its broad outline, jawbone shape or a hoof, in a slick of buzzing, purple and green liquid. The smell is indescribably bad, we actually retch just passing in the car, although it’s clearly perfume to the vultures here. Some carcasses are already white skeletons. The animals have been dying since April or May, Fabio says, starving to death or dying of thirst, their owners waiting for rains that never came. The loss of animals has been worse this year than people can remember, people’s whole herds dying as the nomadic herders grow weaker in search of grazing.

We pass through a village of Samburu people. This is a very decorative tribe indeed, men with painted ostrich feather headresses, festooned with sequins, beads and other ornaments. Men here are often seen, mirror in hand, admiring their beauty – and there is much to admire, certainly. One woman who thought so, was a Swiss, who while on holiday with her boyfriend in Mombasa, met a Samburu who’d come to the city seeking work, and fell in love with him. She left her boyfriend, followed him back to this village, where she married him, bore a couple of children and lived here for a while, before it all went pear-shaped and she returned to Europe. She wrote a book about the experience, called White Masai, which was turned into a film.

Driving through the village, we sense an unease, directed at us, and a little hostility from the spear-carrying warriors. “I have been attacked by these people,” Fabio says, and we speed up.

After some time, another village appears in the desert. Like most here, it is just a stopping place – a settlement of perhaps 20 roundhouses, constructed from sticks, with skins thrown over the top. The tribes, all nomadic, move frequently, so nothing is permanent. All they take with them is what they can load easily onto a donkey or two, so usually, the houses will be left and new ones constructed at the next place using more sticks from days and days walk away. There are very few trees here – the forest that carpeted this area in the early 1970s has long ago been cut for housing, charcoal burning – which is a new cash occupation for herders who have lost their animals – or firewood. It’s a tragic cycle of degradation that worsens as the population increases.

We pull into the village, called Sarima, stopping by the schoolteacher, Lowoi’s hut. He is one of just two men here, I notice, the others are all women and children, who gather excitedly around, tugging at our fingers and repeating the few words of English they know. “How are you? How are you?”

The men, it transpires, are all off looking for the goats. Last night, there was a raid by another tribe, and most of their goats were stolen. Suspicion falls on the Samburu. This tiny village of Turkanas would have a hard time taking on the Samburu, but there is a combatant faction of Turkanas, a rebel group that live in the mountains and trained to survive anything. Last year, the Samburu stole some goats from the Turkana, who called on this military faction. The rebels responded by going into the Samburu lands and stealing thousands and thousands of goats and cattle. “You could see these vast herds of animals were taken, and then distributed among Turkana villages,” Fabio says. “The army came with helicopters and guns, but they were no match for the rebels and had to return to base with dead soldiers.”

I am beginning to understand the nervousness we saw in the Samburu village we passed. But I still don’t really understand why they persist in this ridiculous deadly cycle of cattle raiding. “It’s just what they do. They don’t know any other way,” Fabio explains, rather unsatisfactorily. “They used to fight only with spears and sticks, which was bad enough; now they have AK47s and many many people die.”

Lowoi wants to show me the school-cum-church. It’s a small hut, like all the others, but with a small lectern in it. Twenty children pile in and sing a hymn in Turkana, their high-pithed voices belting out the song in perfect harmony. Then, in our honour, they sing their English song: Baa baa, black sheep. It’s fantastic rendition, even if it makes no sense because the words are mixed up and the teacher, singing along, also seems to have made up parts of it.

We’re in the village to do business. The people here make incense – many of them are chewing it, like gum – a wonderfully fragrant type that they collect from a specific tree, more than 25-kilometres-walk away. Fabio is buying the incense for use in the missionaries during mass and the like. With concentration, the entire village crowds around two women who are measuring out cupfuls into a sack. With this many people counting, no one will get cheated, it’s sure. It’s a long process, but at the end, we load two enormous sacks of incense into the car, pay the village schoolteacher, who will, I hope, distribute the money fairly, and we’re ready to continue. Before we can leave, there’s some more negotiating to be done. Several of the women want a ride in our car to the oasis 35-kilometres away, to fill their jerry cans and save them the walk they usually make every two or three days. There’s not enough room for all of them and Fabio wants to be fair. Also, 10-15 kids have climbed into the back too, just for fun. Eventually, a compromise is reached, whereby we take six women and a couple of kids who actually live that way and have come for schooling here.

We set off again, everyone in the back bursts into song, and we have great music all the way. By now, Fabio has switched to the second tank, whose dial registers there is nearly one-quarter of a tank left. But something worrying occurs: the fuel-out light stays on even with this tank – the dial must be faulty. Fabio does some quick mental calculating, we have 35 kilometres to go, and we are on the emergency reserve, which could last 10 kilometres, he reckons.

We are driving through uninterrupted desert now. There are no trees, nothing. The high salt levels here render this strange volcanic landscape utterly barren. We’re in the Rift Valley. It is hot and there are balls of pillow larva everywhere and fossils – evidence of a time when this would have been under the sea. It’s incredibly windy here, the sort of wind that knocks down a motorcyclist, Fabio tells us ruefully, having been flattened himself. There will be a giant windfarm here by a Dutch-Kenyan consortium, with construction being started as soon as next year. More than 350 turbines will be installed over and area of 7.5 square kilometres. Fabio worries that the isolated tribes living here will lose their culture and way of life with the influx of so many outsiders to the area.

We climb a slope and there, revealed below us in this stark rocky landscape, is the lake. It’s amazingly green – they call it the Jade Sea – and it stretches all the way to Ethiopia. The lake’s shoreline is longer than Kenya’s Indian Ocean coastline, but the lake is shrinking year by year. 10,000 years ago, the water was 100 metres higher and used to feed the Nile. Now, siltation, dams and irrigation in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley have reduced its inflow considerably. Ethiopia is also building a major dam on the Omo River for hydropower, which will cut flow further. But, in an unusual upstream-downstream situation, it is in Ethiopia’s interest to maintain flow to the lake, which has no outlet, because it is the evaporation from Lake Turkana that provides the essential rains over its highlands, including the Simien Mountains.

The brilliant lake looks so out of place in this dry, barren desert, that it takes our minds off the current fuel crisis. But I am soon back to anxiously calculating how many hours it will take us to walk 15-20 kilometres with our bags in the searing sun and whether we will manage on less than one-quarter of a litre of drinking water. Each time I work it out, I come to the same disturbing conclusion. We haven’t passed a single other vehicle since we left the mission, four hours ago. We have iodine tablets, so we could purify water, but the lake water is salty.

The car keeps on going, despite its increasingly flat tyre and the fuel issue. Every now and then, Fabio flicks between the empty tanks and back again. The light stays on. Despite the continually joyous singing from the back, my earlier high spirits have slumped and I’m anxious and tired. The three of us drive silently along as the rocky track rumbles away beneath us.

More time passes, and then we mount a hill and, suddenly, there below us is the most wonderful sight I’ve seen: seemingly out of nowhere, the town of Loyangalani appears like a mirage before us. It is nothing but a few hundred stick and palm huts, but it is the most welcome sight and I drink it in. We drive through the town, my anxiety gone now we are in civilization, and head for a cluster of palms and other trees that grow by the oasis. We have arrived at the Catholic mission, 15 hours late and much adventured.

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Journey to Lake Turkana (part 1)

November 4, 2009 by Gaia

“I would like to visit the tribes living around Lake Turkana,” I tell our ever-helpful guesthouse owner, Sally. “Do you know which buses go there from Nairobi and whether it’s popular and we need to book?”

She breaks into peals of laughter. “Buses don’t go there,” she laughs. “Hee, hee, which bus to Lake Turkana?” she chuckles again. The area is a lawless zone, troubled by frequent tribal conflict, agressive bandits and reached by some of the worst roads on the continent.

Eventually, Sally stops laughing and takes pity on us. After establishing that we really do want to go there, she tells us that she has a cousin who’s a Catholic priest at the Lake, and she promises to call him.

A few minutes later, her happy, smiling face is back. “When do you want to go there?”

In the next few days, I reply. I’m really just at the information-gathering stage.

“You can go tomorrow,” she says.

It turns out that one of the priests from the mission is in Isiolo awaiting a spare part for his LandRover. He can drive us back to the mission from there. And how would we get back? The same priest will be journeying back to Nairobi in a few days to pick people up from the airport. It would work out perfectly. And yet… the region is so unstable and the ongoing drought is inflaming things more.

The opportunity is too good to pass up, we decide, and by 6.30 the next morning we are at the matatu (minivan) station in the city, waiting to leave for Isiolo. Four and a half hours later, after a very uncomfortable journey with many police checks, it’s “everybody off” at a small town called Nanyuki. The matatu driver has lied to us, cheated us on the ticket and dropped us just two-thirds of the way. An hour or so later, the priest calls us from Isiolo, where he is anxious to get going. We are now sitting on a matatu bound for Isiolo but it won’t leave until it is full, and there is just one other passenger (not counting the three people who are sitting in the vehicle as a way of passing the time, but with no intention of going to Isiolo). Another hour passes and there are no other passengers. The priest rings again, with increasing urgency in his voice. More time passes. Nick and I decide we have no choice and stump up the fares for the invisible passengers on condition we move NOW.

We finally leave and begin with good speed. Of course, as soon as we set off, people ascend the matatu from nowhere, happy for the free trip and deciding that even if they didn’t want to travel to Isiolo, it’s free and there are Westerners to stare at. The tarmac road soon disappears and we are jolting along uncomfortably in a steel can built for penance. As we approach Isiolo, the matatu slows to a walking pace and then almost stops. Increasingly frantic, and with the priest calling again, I urge the driver onwards, but he feigns deafness. It’s excruciating but we roll into town finally, while I scan every billboard and building for the Catholic mission. It’s a difficult task – 400 million Africans are ‘born again’ Christians and the various sects of Christianity are well-represented in this small town, which also has a large Muslim community. There is the Church of Wonderful Miracles, the Church of The Best Future… indeed, when I start my own religion, I can see that I’ll struggle for an original name. People give something like 10% of their meagre incomes to these groups – that’s far more than the government takes in taxation.

We spot the Catholic mission eventually, and there, waiting patiently in a LandCruiser, with its engine running, is Father Fabio-Miguel Chaparro, a 35-year-old missionary from Columbia. We are more than two hours late, but he couldn’t be more understanding. He drives us into the mission, where he must gather his things together, and Nick and I stretch out beside the jeep, while schoolgirls from the mission’s highschool file past. There are plenty of longing glances directed at the handsome young priest, but he is oblivious, checking the engine and politely replying to unnecessary questions from doe-eyed schoolgirls, who hitch their skirts as short as they dare under the persnickety gaze of passing nuns. Nick, too, gets his fair share of interested glances, before the nuns shoo the girls away from our car.

Within minutes we’re on the road, driving a little too fast through the town, past faces that glare at us in open hostility. And then we see it: a great blackened field in the heart of the town, still smoking from its charcoal heart, where people are attempting to reconstruct A-frames of timber. The market place was burned to the ground yesterday, Fabio tells us. Everything was destroyed – all the shops, stalls, produce (much of it desperately-needed food), people’s houses and livelihoods gone.

It started with the shootings, he explains. Yesterday there were gun battles in the streets between the Turkana and Borana tribes. More than 10 people died, including a 14-year-old schoolgirl from the mission school. She was travelling in a truck when the Borana ordered everybody off, separated out the Turkanas, including her, and shot them all.

The conflict, like all conflicts here, began with one tribe stealing cattle from the other. The mainly Christian Turkanas, whose ancesters came from Ethiopia, burned the marketplace, which is mostly owned by the mainly Muslim Boranas, whose ancesters originated in Somalia. The Boranas are now seeking revenge and the Catholic mission is considered by Boranas, to be on the side of the Turkanas. Our car, with its missionary stickers fixed to both sides, is a moving target.

As we speed out of the town, Nick and I are tensely watchful. Squashed next to Fabio, we are on ambush alert. Every man, woman and child is a potential killer. many hold guns, bought cheaply from Somalia, or from the Sudan via Ethiopia. Corrupt police officers provide the tribes with plenty of bullets, and then vanish when trouble kicks off. Fabio points out a patch of desert where planes carrying weaponry land at night. “Insurgents live in that mountain, there,” he points, as we crash past on the dirt track that passes for a road. We are thrown left and right, up and down, painfully against the car’s hard interior, but Fabio doesn’t slow the pace. Large boulders and high mud embankments appear at the side of the road – perfect concealment for men with guns – we breathe slightly easier on flatter, more open landscapes.

Turkana people flag him down for a lift, but he motion’s the Kenyan sign for “full” and speeds past. “A few months ago, I was carrying Turkanas in the back and Samburu people opened fire at us. Three bullets hit the car: one went past me here [motioning from his door, past his stomach to the other door], one hit the engine and one punctured the front tyre, but I drove on a couple of hundred metres until I lost control,” he says. “I was so scared. That was the fastest tyre change I’ve ever done,” he smiles. “Since then, I don’t give lifts to a tribe in a mixed area.”

Fabio’s mobile phone keeps ringing with people asking him where he is. Fabio is deliberately vague, not answering and faking signal outage in a way I’m sure priests aren’t supposed to. He catches my quizzical look. “If I tell people where I am, the message will spread and we will be ambushed,” he explains.

Ostriches stand at the side of the road like made-up cartoon birds, and we pass zebras and tiny, delicate fairy deer called dik diks. It’s hugely exciting for me, having only seen these animals on television or in a zoo, but it’s too dangerous even to slow, let alone stop for photos, so they flit past, while I hope that at least we won’t run them over. we pass no other vehicles but army patrol jeeps and a couple of trucks – “they travel in convoys to survive banditry”.

The kilometres fly away, the road a conveyor belt beneath our tyres, and the hours roll by. This part of the road will be tarmacked by the Chinese, Fabio says. But people here are not enthusiastic about the project. The Chinese have a reputation for eating everything near their work sites, he explains. They eat the precious goats, causing conflict with the tribal owers, they eat dogs, so that people either sell their dogs to the Chinese, or steal another’s dog to sell to the Chinese. And they eat the wildlife too, everything from deer and antelope to big cats, which are killed by the tribes and sold to the Chinese. Most upsetting is the healthy trade in ivory, which again involves local people shooting elephants for the lucrative ivory sales to the Chinese. Then there is the concern about prostitution, which clings to construction sites like a spectre of death in a region where at least one in ten has HIV.

Five hours later and the road abruptly disappears into a small river. Stuck between us and the other bank is a floundered truck, with its driver and companions, spade in hand, attempting to dig it free. Fabio gets out of the car and assesses the situation. The men are all Boranas, which makes us nervous but we are hundreds of kilometres from Isiolo now. The main fear is no longer being shot at, but whether we can pass the water. The LandCruiser is bad in water and mud, Fabio explains. He gets out of the car (engine still running for a quick getaway if necessary) and approaches the men. Things seem to be cordial, if not overly friendly and we get out and stretch our legs too.

One of the men tells fabio that he knows of a route through and our car will be able to pass. He will show us the way, walking ahead of our car. Fabio hesitates for the briefest time, and then agrees, grateful. We get back in the car and drive forward, following the man. His friend, a man with sly eyes, who I instantly mistrust, then jumps into the back of our jeep where our bags are. I think about my mobile phone, a very cheap model but with my precious phone number and contacts, and surely of some value here. And my iPod with its hours of treasured listening – probably the most expensive item I own. Both are in the top zip pocket of my bag.

“My bag is there,” I tell Fabio, and his eyes show he understands, but can do nothing at the moment. I crane around but cannot see the man clearly. We cross the river at speed, keeping a low gear and we are past the truck and onto the submerged road on the other side. The car is sliding in the mud and water, with Fabio doing his best to keep at least one wheel on drier mud at all times. Just as looks as though we are going to make it, the walking guide motions for us to turn left off the road and head through thr brushland. “It’s better if we keep straight ahead,” I plead to Fabio, but he says that the man has scouted out the best way already.

We follow him until we reach another deep river crossing. Fabio stops at the bank, but the man beckons him across until Fabio agrees. The opposite bank is high and steep. We plunge forward into the river and with spinning wheels, make it to the other side, but the heavy LandCruiser cannot mount the bank. Again and again Fabio revs the engine and tries to lift us out, but with the clutch burning and the wheels spinning freely, we go nowhere. He tries to reverse us back out, but succeeds only in sinking us deeper into the mud.

The two men guesture for us to go forward or back, but we are stuck. All around the car, the brown water swirls increasingly high. The men tell Fabio that they will go back to the group by the truck and bring men to help push us out. We watch them disappear into the gloom. We wait in the car in the river.

Time passes and there is no sign of the men. “We need to get out and try to move the car ourselves, Fabio,” I say. It’s growing dark. We’ve been in the river for more than an hour and night is curling at the edges. Fabio insists that they will return, believing their word. I am afraid that we will have to spend the night here and be easy prey for bandits and vengeful tribal groups.

Nick has an idea, inspired by something that he’s seen on a Ray Mears documentary. We should cut branches and lay them under the wheels, he suggests. Still Fabio doesn’t want us to leave the car, saying the men will be here soon. But I have had enough and removing my shoes and socks, I wade into the river, the slimy mud oozing between my toes. I check my bag in the back – everything seems in place, I note with relief.

There is little vegetation here, but a kind of dry shrubby grass grows, and we snap its twigs fairly easily, ignoring the splinters and hoping there are no scorpions. We gather enough of a bundle to allow Fabio to reverse the car backwards until the rear wheels are on the first bank again, but he cannot get the car completely out – the front wheels are sunk deeply into the mud. We burrow at the mud, using our hands and a spade from the car. We go further afield to gather more branches, fearful of what the twilight holds in this wild African bush, nervous of going too far from the safety of our car’s headlights.

Eventually, with the front wheels cleared of mud and the back wheels lined with twigs, Fabio makes for the other bank in one giant rev of the engine, his foot slammed onto the accelerator. He almost makes it – the front wheels mount the other bank. Now the back wheels are stuck. We battle on with our branches and spade until eventually, Fabio clears the car and drives off waiting for us well clear of the sticky mud.

It is now utterly dark, the kind of complete darkness that your eyes can’t quite believe, opening themselves wider and wider, hoping to drink light from somewhere. We are exhausted, clogged from head to foot in sticky mud. I have thorns in my feet and scratches on my arms and legs, but we are free of the river and ready to continue. The men never returned.

We push on, skidding on the track, our tyre treads clogged and smooth with mud. A LandRover would have crossed that river with no problem, Fabio says. He repeats a frustration I have heard in every developing country from NGOs to agencies: LandRovers are preferred for appalling road conditions because they are light, flexible and have good tyres, but they cost nearly twice as much as Toyota LandCruisers, the spare parts are difficult to come by and very expensive and, the killer problem, new LandRovers have complicated computerised engines so mechanics cannot fix them. The new cars are effectively useless in anywhere remote, because they can’t be fixed or maintained, whereas Toyota, mindful of their developing-world user base, keep the LandCruiser engine delightfully simple and easy to fix even in small villages. NGOs, military, police and UN workers are all switching to LandCruisers.

We come to a fork in the track and Fabio takes the righthand branch. After five minutes, he stops, uncertain. We spin around and he returns to the fork. More confidently, he takes the righthand branch again and we drive on for around 10 kilometres. He is tired and frazzled and unsure of the way. We stop again. “This is not the road,” he decides, and we spin around again. The fuel is almost completely gone in one tank, and we have just a quarter of a tank in the other. Our destination, the village of Loyangalani on the shore of Lake Turkana, is at least 7 hours away.

At the fork, we try the left track and after a while Fabio smiles. “This is the road.” We pick up speed and career along, glimpsing eyeshine from big cats – perhaps leopard – in the blackness. Suddenly, with no warning, the road vanishes beneath our front tyres and we plummet heavily into a large hole. my head collides with the roof of the car and my knees bang painfully into the dashboard. The force of the crash bounces us up and out and we stop in a cloud of smoke, get out and check the car. Miraculously, the smoke turns out to be dust, not, as feared, steam from a bust radiator, and it looks like we’ve escaped intact. We’re shaken up and I feel increasingly nauseous, worried I’m going to vomit and with a searing headache, but we can’t stay here.

We drive on, while a slow puncture develops in the rear tyre. The fuel-out light is now on and there is nowhere between here and the Loyangalani mission to buy fuel. The stress and sickness produces a strange effect on me: I find myself unable to keep my eyes open, my head lolling painfully around. I battle to open my eyes – it’s only 9pm – but fail. My stomach periodically heaves but I manage not to puke, probably because my stomach’s empty. Neither Nick or I have eaten since breakfast at 6am, and more uncomfortably, we ran out of drinking water before midday, expecting to be able to buy more. We are dehydrated and a day spent driving under a harsh hot sun has taken its toll.

Fabio decides we should break the journey at the village of South Horr, where there is a mission. There is no mobile phone signal here, so we can’t phone ahead and warn the priest, but knowing that we are just another hour from a safe bed revives me enough to lift my eyelids.

We arrive at the mission, tooting to the surprised guard to let us in and wake a sleepy priest from his bed. We emerge from the car thick with mud and shaky, but so glad to be in the mission courtyard. The Father shows us to beds, provides us with a towel and soap and bathroom and shows us where the boiled drinking water is. We glug down litres, wash until our skin reappears and fall into bed, too tired to erect a mosquito net: big mistake.

Sleep comes blissfully and by 5.30 next morning, we are dressed and back in the car. We are increasingly hungry, but it will be a few more hours till we can eat.

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Drought: too much of a good thing

November 3, 2009 by Gaia

“A little bit of drought forces the different tribes to live closely and cooperate over the few water sources. But if a drought is too severe or lasts a long time, then animals start dying and tribes steal cattle from each other, leading to violent conflict,” says Father Fabio.

“Yes, but when the drought is really bad, people get their animals back more easily, because the raiding tribes and the animals they take are too sick and weak to go very far,” Father Andrew points out.

The drought is really bad. It’s not that the nomadic people here are unused to dry conditions – they live in a desert – but droughts are becoming more frequent, lasting for longer and the rains between them are becoming shorter. Droughts used to occur every 9 or 10 years, followed by rains. The past decade has seen severe droughts occuring every other year, and it hasn’t rained at all in some parts for the past four years. People’s traditional drought-management strategies no longer work. There is no longer time for the people and animals to recover from a drought and build up their strength and resiliance, and breed more animals, before the next one hits. Global warming has brought higher temperatures that evaporate what water there is faster from wells and reservoirs, and the little vegetation there is is heavily overgrazed by herds from miles around, making it even scarcer. Lack of water has brought hydropower shortages that plunge even Nairobi into darkness. In parts of Ethiopia and Kenya where I have visited, there are lethal outbreaks of cholera and diarrhea, people are starving – in some cases to death – animals are dying, and it’s going to get so much worse. The rains, which are late to arrive, are predicted by meteorologists to be particularly heavy this year – it’s an El Nino year – washing away crops, causing landslides and flooding and drowning weakened animals. (Large parts of the major coastal road to Mombasa have already been washed away.)

Kenya is an uneasy conglomerate of tribes, stirred up and manipulated by Arab slave traders, then British colonialists and, following a brief period of post-independence calm and prosperity, fighting amongst each other for land, animals and water. Kenya has slipped 20 places on the Human Development Index since 2002, the government is corrupt and making little progress towards democratic reform, frustrating conflict-weary Kenyans and alarming the international community including US President Obama, who last week exerted a bit more diplomatic pressure on the government here. Quite apart from effecting the security situation and increasing bureaucracy and tedious bribes, corruption has a more insidious side: people cannot tell whether the medicines they buy are real or fake, or for example, whether the seeds that they pin their futures on are of stated quality.

More than 80% of this equatorial nation is arid, populated by nomadic tribes that cover vast areas with cattle, goats and camels. It is difficult to overemphasise the importance that animals hold for these tribes. They are everything to these people: status – without animals, a man cannot marry, with a large herd, he may have 6 or 7 wives; wealth, food (these people eat nothing but blood, milk and meat), security – the people love their animals dearly. Many times I have heard of cases where people rather spend money on medicine for a sick goat than their own sick child. And the relationship defies understanding in other ways, too. When a drought is very severe, such as it is now, it would seem to make sense for the poeple to sell their animals before they get very sick, and use the money to buy food, or save the cash for better times to buy healthy animals. At least, you would think, when the people get very hungry, they would begin to eat their animals. Instead, what mostly happens, is that the tribes watch their animals getting sicker and sicker then dying, each day hoping that the next will bring rain.

As they lose animals, the compulsion becomes greater to raid a neighbouring tribe for theirs. And so the deadly cycle continues.

Climate change may finally break this cycle. The increased frequency of droughts here, which fit into climate model predictions for the region, is bringing about changes in the way these people live, the social structure of tribal groups and even the role that women play in these deeply conservative communities. For example, the Dassenach, a tribe with 10 sub-clans that live on both sides of the Ethiopian border (around the fertile Omo Valley and the desert shores of Lake Turkana), is a nomadic herding people, which measures the status of an individual by the numebr of animals he owns. This number dictates everything from whether he can marry to his position within the clan. But there is another, low-caste community of Dassenach, called the Dies, who do not own animals, but who instead fish – an occupation widely considered as inferior and beneath a ‘real man’. In times of hardship, such as when animals die or must be sold, herding members may become Dies for a while, until they can rescue themselves from this indignity by getting some animals again.

Fishing, though, is a very secure livelihood. Fishermen don’t go hungry, nobody can steal their fish because they don’t need to wander to remote areas to graze, and fish can be sold in the city for cash to buy other things (unlike sick or dead goats). So, a subtle change is occuring: Dies, who have long laboured tolerated their lowly position, are gradually improving in status. Being more settled, means they can take advantage of education and healthcare facilities in villages and towns, and so improve their position more. But it is spelling the end, perhaps, for a nomadic way of life that goes back millennia. Former herders can be seen selling charcoal at the side of the road, and living in the slums of cities like Nairobi, where a cholera outbreak is currently taking tens of lives.

This is just one example; there are many more. But our time spent with these fascinating, colourful tribespeople, and the journey we made to get there, is every bit as exciting and the subject of my next post.

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Nairobi nightmares

October 28, 2009 by Gaia

Dirty, dangerous and difficult, Nairobi currently beats Jo’burg and Lagos to the title of most violent African city. The city sprawls under a pall of thick, choking smog, visibly added to by every truck, taxi and bus, including ours. The compact business district is cleaner and seems better ordered than many cities, but ringed by chaotic chocker-block roads. The bars and restaurants are lively, with music and plenty of customers, but as darkness falls, the streets empty. We get taxis after dark.

Every Westerner we meet here has some dark tale about robberies or worse. Night buses, we’ve been warned by those who’ve learned the hard way, are infiltrated by stooge passengers, who pull out a gun and demand all your belongings be handed over to a vehicle that draws up next to the bus. Budget trips to the Masai Mara have ended violently, we’ve heard from traumatised backpackers. Tents slashed at night with machetes by gun-toting gangs who steal everything and cut people. Two Western women were raped at one campsite last week; a few days later, the same camp was attacked leaving a man with his neck slashed. In Nairobi, tourists have acid thrown into their faces by robbers, while passers-by do nothing – perhaps too frightened to help. Kidnapping is increasing. For the first time in this 11-month journey, we feel uncomfortable in a country.

It’s a city of vast wealth disparity, peopled by the richest in Africa and seething with some of the poorest. Slums that rival Soweto, with millions living in ghettos that lack water, sanitation, power or basic health facilities. It is here that most of the city’s violence occurs, not on the nicely paved streets where we tourists walk. But hopping on the brightly decorated buses, that on closer inspection are painted with guns and hand-grenades, the noise and press of people here feels more aggressive than elsewhere.

Our guesthouse hosts at the Khweza B&B couldn’t be nicer or more helpful. We are paying more than we can afford to stay here, hoping that physical comfort will allay some of the mental discomfort. The city has a potential to be quite pretty – there are many more trees than other cities, some are in full bloom, miraculously purple-flowered through the grey air. Those who do not scowl or try to con or seduce us with expensive tours, smile in friendship. “Jambo,” we greet each other in Swahili.

One of the biggest differences compared to Ethiopia, is the comparative efficiency of communication. Unlike its northern neighbour, the Kenyan government doesn’t have a stranglehold over the networks, and competition in Kenya has produced a generally better phone service here. We can make calls and they get through! The phone networks here are so good and phones so well-distributed throughout the country that mobiles are used as a fantastic sort of banking system. Called M-Pesa, the prepay mobile system allows a person in one place to buy airtime credit, which can then be transferred to another person somewhere else, who can retrieve cash by selling the credit to a phone operator using a special PIN. It’s a great banking system for people too poor and uncredit-worthy to get a bank account, allowing easy bill-paying, fast money transfer and meaning that instead of keeping savings in the form of livestock that can die or need to be sold to release the cash, they can access as little or as much of their cash as they want.

Internet here is also faster than in Ethiopia, which isn’t saying much, but speeds are still far slower than through most of Asia, despite the new fibre-optic cable. Still, we have managed to upload a few photos and may manage some more, with luck.

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Monkeying around

October 27, 2009 by Gaia

Six-month-old David, an infant gelada baboon, is turning excited somersaults on Nick’s head; doing little run-ups along his neck and then bouncing expertly off Nick’s head, into the air and landing on Nick’s back.

It’s so funny, I can hardly stop laughing long enough to take a photo and, typically, when I do, my camera malfunctions so that the pictures are dark – the flash didn’t work. Soon David settles down to a bit of grooming. Disappointingly, Nick’s hair is short – certainly in comparison to a male gelada’s – and he doesn’t seem to find anything interesting hidden within. Before long, David’s back to dry-humping Nick’s neck, which everyone finds very entertaining, except Nick, who strangely puts a stop to it and offers David some diversionary oats instead.

He’s spent almost all of his short life as an illegal pet, tied up in someone’s home, before being rescued by Kate, an Englishwoman who lives in Gonder. Yesterday, her husband drove into the Simien Mountains national park and sought out our little group – Gelada baboon researcher Aliza le Roux (from University of Michigan), her assistant Vanessa Wilson, me and Nick – and left us with his little monkey parcel. We had just spent the day among hundreds of these charismatic monkeys (they are, in fact, not true baboons), watching them play, socialise, fight, eat grass and endlessly chatter to each other. It’s the chattering that brought Aliza here. She’s fascinated by gelada ‘conversations’ and has identified more than 30 different vocalisations. “They are wonderful research subjects, because unlike other primates, they don’t hide away in the tree tops, and they talk constantly,” she tells me, when she’s not recording their babblings.

Aliza is a delightfully enthusiastic South African woman, who works tirelessly in this remote, lonely outpost – it took me and Nick nine hours to walk to their house from the nearest town – drawn on by her fascination and love for the geladas. She giggles at the baby baboon antics and points out some of the amusing ways the males interact with each other. She has got to know more than 150 individuals, recorded and named them – the glamourously coated males are named after 70s hair bands.

Gelada baboons are found only in Ethiopia and only in the highlands where their food – alpine grasses – grows. Just as climate change is impacting the human population here (one-tenth of the population relies on food handouts to survive, and that’s before the current drought situation, which more than doubles those in need), the geladas are also affected. The high-protein grasses they eat grow only under certain temperature and moisture conditions. Warmer temperatures and erratic rains mean poorer quality and less grass. And warmer temperatures also allows farmers to grow crops and graze cattle at higher altitudes, again reducing the gelada range. When we visit, there is a high-profile UNESCO and IUCN meeting being held in the park. The armed scouts, whose job it is to prevent illegal overgrazing, seem to be reducing the numbers of herds in the park, Aliza says. But the grass is still very short and we see plenty of pastoralists with goats, cows and donkeys munching the baboons’ lunch. People here are incredibly poor. Famine stalks the land. What grazing there is for livestock will not be reserved for a monkey that locals fear and hate.

Aliza and Vanessa, a sweet Scottish graduate, who’s out here for 6 months, share a small house in the park, the roof and walls were rebuilt for them after being bombed in the war with Somalia during the 1990s. It’s here we take David. He sits on Vanessa’s lap, while Aliza cooks us a lovely dinner and we have tej, the local honey wine, with it. David mews a little during dinner, but after, he settles down to sleep in Vanessa’s lap in front of the fire. They are wonderful hosts and we spend a great evening chatting away, before retiring to our tin hut across the way.

Next morning we’re all up early and David is chattering away. It’s a big day for the little fella: today he’s going to be released into the gelada population that Aliza’s been following. We drive through the park to find them, and they spot David immediately. We’re soon surrounded by hundreds of curious little faces, all pushing past each other to get a look at what the humans have brought in the metal pickup van.

It’s an anxious moment for all of us, rooting for David and his big Born Free moment. Vanessa unties the cord that’s been around his neck for perhaps his whole life, and steps away from him. Panic stricken, the little monkey jumps on Nick for safety and height, overwhelmed by the many baboons. There follows a series of attempts, where he ventures bravely onto the ground and then has an interaction with one or more baboons, and runs to a human for protection.

After a while, a friendly older male extends a hand and David cautiously allows himself to be groomed. This time, when he gets scared by too many approaches, David jumps onto his new friend’s back, who lip-flicks threateningly at the others to keep them back. Above the scene, we humans exchange excited glances: perhaps, it will work?

David appears to join the group for a while, playing with other infants and using his new friend-protector for support. But at some stage, he gets scared by a big female and her babies. He loses his friend and panics, clutching at Nick’s ankles as we try to ignore his chatterings, hoping he seeks support in the group rather than from one of us.

Eventually, Nick and I have to leave the mountains and head down. We leave David, heartbreakingly alone on the grass, far from the group. Aliza and Vanessa end up taking him home again that night, and trying again on subsequent days. We hear that it finally worked, that David has settled into the group and made friends.

Posted in Biodiversity, Climate change, Travel | 2 Comments »

Wolfless

October 27, 2009 by Gaia

The signs were bad: the wolf researchers had already had a tyre blowout before we joined them. That was the spare tyre gone and, being a Landrover, replacement tyres could only be sourced from Addis, hundreds of miles south. We decided to continue anyway – as Chris Gordon, the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme’s coordinator pointed out, it was the first tyre puncture they’d had in 7 months with the car, so how unlucky could we be?

Very, it turned out. We had gone just half an hour into the journey from Gonder to the Simien Mountains National Park when there was an ominous bang. Chris stopped the car and he, his partner Anne-Marie Stewert, the other researchers, me and Nick hopped out to take a look. Flat tyre. We jacked it up, took off the tyre, stopped a truck heading to the nearest town and sent oe of the guys off with the tyre to get it fixed.

We were en route to one of the few remaining habitats for this most endangered canid, Africa’s rarest carnivore. The Ethiopian wolf is fox like in colour and unusual in behaviour. Chris and Anne-Marie’s group is the only one working to actively conserve the species, by vaccinating dogs against rabies (their main threat) and trying to convince the government here to allow them to deliver oral vaccination to the wolves by baiting.

They were travelling to the Simiens from their research base in the Bale Mountains, where there are 250 wolves, to collect data on the northern population. With them was a researcher from Frankfurt Zoological Society who was collecting GPS data on land-use change – the wolves’ diet consist almost entirely of marmoset rodents, and as agriculture creeps up the mountains, the rodents are being ploughed out of existence, threatening the wolves.

Nick and I were very excited to be seeing the wolves, and happy when an hour later, the tyre returned fixed. We continued down the road for perhaps another four minutes, when the tyre reflattened. Aaggh! Very frustrating. It would take another four days four a new tyre to arrive from Addis.

As the crowd of local people with, as is always the way in these places, nothing better to do than stand around watching us, grew, me and Nick had to make a tough decision.

We decided to press on into the mountains, rather than turn back. We hitched a lift from a passing truck, and got ourselves organised with the compulsory scout (guy with gun to protect us from leopards), guide, mule and mule-man. We bought food from the market, rented cooking supplies and headed up on foot into the mountains, the largest high-altitude ecosystem in Africa.

On the way, above flower-filled meadows and streams, we saw beautiful lammergeier birds (bearded vultures) soaring effortlessly above us. Then one dropped a horse bone from a great height, precisely onto a rock just a few metres from us. They do this to release the marrow – they have specially shaped tongues to scoop it out – and we were luckier than one Ancient Greek poet, who met his end when a lammergeier dropped a tortoise on his head.

The path rose higher and higher, and beside us, the escarpment grew more and more spectacular. Once we get decent internet connection, we’ll upload some images.

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Harar and her hyenas

October 26, 2009 by Gaia

We head east towards the war-ravaged, sorry lands of Somalia. We cross brown, barren land unrelieved by any greenery. Marks, like the scratches made by colossal fingernails show where rivers presumably run in the wet season. Mud houses stand in the dug recesses used to build them. Goats nibble at the dust. Women walk by, bent double under their burdens of firewood, or stiffly straight with the branches supported on their heads.

At the UNHCR in Addis, we met Amare G-Egziabher, a man whose job it is to help manage the hundreds of thousands of refugees that arrive here from across the disputed border. Ten years ago there were more than 1 million refugees in the country, with contributions from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Now there are a couple of hundred thousand fewer, but Ethiopia has one of the biggest refugee burdens in a the continent with the world’s highest number of refugees. They live in a large camps, like the one at Kebribeyah, in which each household (average number of family members is more than 16) inhabits a small, one-room tent made from patches of cloth and sacks. Each tent seems to small to hold more than 4 people. Many of the camps have been here for more than 15 years – children have been born here, grown up and known no other address. There is nothing except circumstance to distinguish the inhabitants from the Somali clans that live on either side of the border – they speak the same language, follow the same customs and traditions and, in common to their culture, share everything they have.

The biggest problem is water. There shouldn’t be so many people living in this concentrated group so far into the desert. The region sustainably supports a few pastoralist communities, who harvest their water in traditional tankas. Amare is looking at options for piping and pumping water from tens of kilometres away. At the moment, they receive water rations via an expensive UN tanker or through the few groundwater pumps.

Fuel is another problem. Women and girls travel for miles every day to procure fuelwood, wasting precious time when they could be studying or earning money, and risking rape and other attacks during their forays. Cooking for up to 23 family members in these small tents is a dirty, smoky, assault on the respiratory tract, not to mention a considerable fire risk. This last, is something that the rather wonderfully named Gaia Project, seeks to address. (Thanks: Dave Fenton.)

I met up with the project’s enthusiastic director Milkyas Debebe, who is distributing ethanol-fuelled stoves throughout the country’s refugee camps, transforming the daily cooking experience for thousands of families. The stoves are a Swedish design for use on boats, so they’re extremely stable, fire-hazard-proof (even tipping them upside down doesn’t leak ethanol) and simple. The ethanol, a byproduct of the sugar production industry, is tainted so it looks, tastes and smells unlike your favourite tipple, and it burns cleanly and efficiently. Ethiopians can even use the ethanol stoves for their beloved coffee ceremonies, which they perform up to six times a day, each time using around 2 kilograms of charcoal, because the stove has a sensitive regulator that can reduce the heat as efficiently as removing a glowing charcoal.

A factory has now been set up to produce the stoves for commercial sale throughout the country.

The only problem, Debebe says in frustration, is the lack of ethanol. The refugees receive rationed amounts when it’s available, but it’s never enough.

We pass through the wide, ordered boulevards of Dire Dawe, chuckling at placards proclaiming ‘Dire Hotel’, ‘Dire Water’, ‘Dire Beer’ and so on.

Harar stands in the hot dusty scrub, shielding itself from the harsh sun with high stone walls. It’s a beguiling city of secret white-walled alleyways leading up and down and around houses that are each painted a bright colour that dazzles. Goats, donkeys and cripples, children and beggars, tribal women wearing beads and tattoos, even camels press past the narrow lanes. The air is full of cooking and insense, cow and human shit, smoke and fumes and fresh laundry.

Our ears swim in the mullahs’ mournful wails of ‘Allah akbar’ – Harar has the highest concentration of mosques of anywhere in the world – of children shrieking, the airborne calls of black kites and grounded barks of dogs fighting outside the butcher’s, the bells from the church, the rhyming chants of beggars and (more confidently) of market sellers. One of the biggest rainbow houses in this multicoloured town is Rimbaud’s. A beautiful, timberframed home, shot through with panes of every colour and internally decorated with painted flowers and nymphs and hung with some of the poet’s rather brilliant pen and ink sketches. Rimbaud’s story is peculiar. The stereotypically sensitive poet arrived here over land and sea via Aden, after failing to achieve success in his native France, and somehow ended up a gunrunner, slave trader and general dodgy character. He got cancer quite young and returned to France, finding success shortly before he died.

We wander ourselves hot and tired and return to our grotty guesthouse room. Wanting to wash after our travels, we enquire about the water – still none. We nap and are woken by the galloping of a thousand rain-horses on the tin roof. It stops after a few minutes but it’s refreshed the darkening streets.

In the early morning, we are woken by the chuckles of hyenas in the football ground below our room. We head out with torches to investigate and find around a dozen spotted hyenas cowering from the local dogs, although they could crush a dog with one bite of those strong jaws. These hyenas are beautiful, not at all like the rather sinister ones I’ve seen in nature documentaries. They are spotted and fluffy with sweet little faces and curled-down ears. They are shy but approach one of the shopfronts slowly. It is 5.30 am and the butcher is already serving customers. He comes out and offers scraps to the hyenas who delicately take the meat from his outstretched hand. We watch amazed. After each customer, he offers the hyenas more. The jealous dogs grumble and bark, but they are no match for the butcher’s stick.

As the light floods in, the hyenas shrink back like the noctornal creatures they are and disappear into the fringes of gloom. Vultures, huge and magnificently ugly, congregate for more scraps and rubbish. The hyenas come here because just a little further around the city walls, ‘hyena men’ have been hand-feeding them for nearly 1000 years. Some feed the beasts with meat held between their teeth.