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Published: February 16th 2009
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Cutting salt
Cutting slabs of salt for cattle - an important resource gathered from the Lake Bogoria Reserve I feel now as though I have two homes, both rural, but worlds apart in the Midlands of England and the Mid Rift of Kenya. Arriving back here to Bogoria I was given a warm welcome by a host of friends and as I started my second round of research in the area. I felt that I had built up the sort of trust that makes things go well. The group of five women that had made films with me came to visit the day after I arrived, walking in the burning heat for over an hour from their village to mine. We sat and discussed tales of creation and evolution over a cup of hot, sweet, milky Kenyan tea.
Judith, the girl I am sponsoring to school, and her sister Catherine also came to call. Judith with a modest pride showed me her mark sheet for her final primary exams - she came second in her class and was top girl and has won a place at one of the top schools in the province. I am pleased for her as her home family is not very stable. A week after my return I took her shopping in Nakuru for
Steppe eagle
Steppe eagles from Siberia and Northern Europe over winter in Kenya her uniform and bedding then to register at the school itself. She looked so smart in her turquoise uniform, eager to start her new studies.
My research got off well as I designed a household questionnaire about use of natural resources with some of my local advisors and the chiefs of the village. It is difficult to design a questionnaire that has meaning to a community that is not ones own. I was trying to adapt a global means of assessing the value of resources but using terminology meaningful to this agro-pastoral community. How do you differentiate between dryland and cultivated land in an area that has shifting cultivation and a patchwork of dry dusty scrub and plots for growing crops of maize? The global term ‘wetlands’ includes swamps and rivers, but each has different resources and cultural values. And how do you put a valuation on drinking water when for part of the year the river has completely dried up and residents queue at a small hole in the rocks to collect a trickle of water?
I enlisted a team of intern students that were attached to Lake Bogoria Reserve to help as interviewers as they all spoke the
digging for water
These women are digging for drinking water in the bed of the Waseges River. Two days later the river was completely dry. local Kalenjin language. They teamed up happily with some of my local village participants, and we soon even had a romance within the two. Even though we had to get up at 5 am every morning to catch the farmers before they took their livestock out to find grazing, my car was full of laughing Kenyan students happy to have a job to do. Their reward was lunch of githeri (beans and corn) every day which costs me about £5 to feed 10-12 people. Some days I treat them to nyama (goat meat). Some days there is no food to be bought in the village. My job is to type all the data from 220 questionnaires into my laptop - a long and tedious job but I hope the analysis will give some interesting findings.
My main problems have been a run of upsets in the house where I stay. Firstly the power was cut off as the council had not paid the bill, only one of my assistants illegally and dangerously bypassed the fuse box till power was resumed (this is Kenya). Then the water tank burst and I was without running water and having to collect it from
The Team
My interview team. Back row: Dennis, Menotano, Rosphine, Agnes. Samson, Engineer, Anthony, Raphael. Front row: Mibei, Anderson, Magdeline the local hotel 2 miles up the road. It’s now has a temporary lining of cement patching up the hole till a new one arrives - one day in the distant future. Then a monkey got into my kitchen, ate all my tomatoes and pooed everywhere - YUK.
I’ve had a few trips out to Lake Bogoria to watch flamingos and other wildlife. It is really dry in the drought and all the antelope walk exhaustedly looking for food or stand in the sparse shade of an acacia tree out of the blistering sun - it reaches 40 degrees many days. By early afternoon it is too hot to think. One set of impressive visitors are the Steppe eagles that have flown here from northern Europe and Siberia to over winter. I have counted around 15 gorging themselves on flamingo carcasses along the lake shore.
I also took a trip to Lake Baringo, a fresh water lake about 30 miles further north. I met up with and gave a talk to a small group of American undergraduate students. I also camped out on the side of the lake with them and we watched the hippos come out of the lake to graze at night from the safety of our camp fire. I bought a tasty chunk of lung fish to bake over the fire - a real treat.
The most disturbing event is a visit I made to an initiation compound for the women. Although now illegal and dying out the practice of FGM still occasionally takes place as a ‘cultural’ event. The red ochre coloured faces of about 15 young women swathed in brown goat skins respectfully smiled at me and they greeted me by slapping their thighs. I tried to understand the reasoning behind it before explaining the complications to the older and younger women. However, unlike past times, all but one of the young women were already married with children and had a secondary education so should have had knowledge of what they had done. They said they were learning ‘Culture’ and that they wanted to go through initiation but I wondered how much is due to pressure from husbands and family. The women spend about a month in isolation before a coming out ceremony where they return to be greeted by the community. I went along to this ‘ceremony’ a few days later but I along with several of my local friends could see little respect for the women or cultural value in it. The young women had just gone to bathe and returned, heads bowed in their skins holding green branches to symbolise their change in status. They then went back to their compound to change for heir life outside. While they waited the men and older women started to dance which was at first fun and a light hearted contest of jumping. But many of the young men were soon drunk on local beer and the traditional dancing gradually became a noisy, dusty maelstrom of jumping bodies. By the time the women emerged again tensions were high and although the girls were supposed to be greeted by the men in a cultural show of dancing they were engulfed and one married girl dragged off by another man so the whole affair was curtailed in a fiasco and fight. I was worried that my being there would be seen as condoning the event but I talked at length to many people and in particular to a primary teacher who is now going to start educating final year girls and boys of 14 about the serious health problems related to the practice. Hopefully change in attitudes will come swiftly. I believe that some cultural values help give people an identity but not those where the cost is health, dignity and sometimes life.
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