Marta spoke forcefully and passionately to us about the long distances between her family and health care, how anyone with a snake bite would simply die while being carried the 5km journey. We interviewed Mary (wife 2) as well, wearing a shiny Snoop Dogg shirt that later appeared on her husband, as she brought brown water out of a nearby ‘shallow well’ (hole) for the baby goats to drink. Humans here drink river water from 3km away and the suggestion that we would drive with equipment to film this and be happy to carry water back for them prompted a flurry of vessel gathering. The landrover was soon completely rammed with people, plastic jerry cans of all sizes, bottles, buckets and other strange things that water could be held in.
Off we wobbled, through the dead sorghum field, over the scrub and the stones, past the family’s dry season ada karin and through the forest. Men shot out to move logs and stones so that the car could go right to the river’s edge. Rolling up their skirts, petticoats and sarongs the women waded as a group to the other side, through the knee-deep but fast-flowing water to where they would dig holes in the wet sand and collect the water that rose, filtered and clear, to fill them. In the car on the way they sung their hearts out, noisily and inspiringly, and they continued to sing songs about water as they crossed. Quite a few were religious songs; in these remote parts it can seem as though missionaries and Irish priests have had a huge God-shaped impact on people’s minds but very often the success appears to be limited a transposing of a Christian concept of God onto a pre-existing Turkana idea of Akuj. Akuj is their supreme being and creator who lives in the sky and will speak to people in their dreams or through their ancestors. On the other hand a Christian idea of the devil, here called Ekipe, seems to have been found less consistent with local ways of thinking; for instance the only manifestation of it Lokale knows is a scapegoat-type role, referred to as the driving force behind bad behaviour and disobedience.
Digging round circular hand-dug holes about a foot deep into the soft wet sand the women waited for water to rise and then scooped it out neatly with their yellow ‘Fry King’ plastic pots before pouring it into larger jerry cans and bottles. Each wife had her own well and made quick work of filling her containers; they even filled two of our own jerry cans for us (jerry cans they lusted after and we ended up leaving as gifts).
As I enjoyed the sticky mud squelching between my toes I explained that such dark river clay is the sort that some women in my country would coat their faces in to make skin smoother and younger-looking. They noted this with curiosity and Elizabeth Kirin showed how here they use it to paint a cross on their forehead at flood time, because that’s when the full river might be carrying diseases that the cross could offer them protection from. They hope God will see their crosses and protect them.
Going back was a bit of an overloaded nightmare, with everyone pushed against each other and the ceiling and some strong smells plus intense heat. But we made it and it was a great feeling to see the abundance of collected water go light-footing back to huts in the hands and on the heads of children and women whose energy, normally spent by the exertions of the journey, was running high.
We worked in the car while it was hot (no sides make it a mercifully cool office) and then fulfilled our promise to take the ever-more-wretched David home. We loaded him and the shit-stinking mattress – to be considered a gift-in-kind from Merlin – and trundled across the scrub and dry riverbeds in search of a more formal sandy track. As he relaxed and the Panadol kicked in he spoke in his lovely well-turned-out way about the places we were passing and it felt like a real robbery, the arthritic pain that had stolen one of our most promising confidants and interviewees. The journey was more like 25km – his 9km promise being a desperate old man’s white lie to get home on – and while Erot was clearly happy to get rid of David (with a scream and a thump onto the floor of his Kalimnyang compound), his two old wives Mary and Lucy looked absolutely horrified at the return of a limp, whinging husband who planned just to lie on the floor and be fed and pinched for the rest of his days. When their stunned silence was over they circled Erot with some older children and asked desperately how the family would go on if David could no longer collect in person his pension (from years of government service as an agricultural officer)?
We left as soon as we could and drove home through the dusk at a much better speed, after picking up an old hide-wearing woman from Kacha Imeri who had a huge bag of maize and three long sugar canes. We talked about Turkana being Erot’s ere, place of ancestors, and how he had to be near them and their graves – offering sacrifices of animals, tobacco, oil and water – if he was to continue receiving their protection and advice. He hopes his children will stay here but he won’t force them to; if they choose to leave though, they will have to come back to their ere to appease the ancestors every so often.
A late moon again and as I drifted into sleep I was sure that the confrontational bleating of a horrible old he-goat was David, crawled back to rot in his patch in the riverbed.
