Set off to the clutch of huts between us and ‘town’, a settlement made up entirely of those brought here from Kakuma and their families. We interviewed Namesek’s son John, the patient attendant who works at a mission health facility. He wasn’t very inspiring but performed animatedly to camera and included gritty stories about saving a boy from a snake bite and a woman from a retained placenta. In what is becoming a signature motif of our interviews so far, a tubby-bellied naked boy staggered around in the back of the shot.
We interviewed Namesek’s old fisherman brother Nakali as he weaved a very neat net outside his hut, which gasped with fishy smoke from the cooking within. He told us the story of how Lake Turkana started according to the people here: it was a shallow well and everyone who used it was supposed to cover it with a large flat stone after they’d taken water; but one day a man was in a rush and forgot to do this so the water rose and rose and rose into what is now the lake.
We backtracked past a tiny shop selling about four things: a few bags of beans and lentils, a little sugar and salt (which we needed) and a couple of exotic others including one bottle of coconut oil for hair and a few dusty tubes of superglue. And past an outdoor rack where some young people were drying de-boned spread-out fish that were light brown like sheets of leather. Then on to the huge laga to interview Paulina, a female neighbour who to me looks like a hyena with her fierce face and long grey fallen mohawk running down the back of her neck. She talked about the charcoal she was making and how hard she works to make an income. She ‘s been a widow since her husband was killed in a Merille raid at Luarangek, and as well as charcoal she carries heavy bundles of thatch and branches for kilometres on her head for other people to build huts with. She was inspiring and brilliant with the red-hot log smouldering behind her (which was definitely adding a few degrees to an afternoon temperature well over forty).
Down to the lake to see men and boys pushing into its choppy waters a pretty green wooden boat and a less attractive fibreglass one donated by Oxfam. One teenage boy was a classic ‘in-betweener’: school educated, unemployed and now caught between worlds. He pratted about in from of the camera doing some MTV style pelvic thrusts that he thought – wrongly – might be preserved by us for posterity. Everyone had a swim in the lovely near-fresh water of the lake, the hills of the islands where only El Molo fishing people live popping out of the horizon in front of us. You can’t see the edges of the lake so you feel you could be on a sea or ocean shored which is exciting. I wondered how much the Turkana dream about what’s over the horizon, apart from remembering proudly that they nicked the Borana’s camels from that direction.
Lokale poses in a traditional fishing boat
We rewarded the production team with chai and mandazis in the absurdly small shop that sits at Kataboi’s most exciting faultline: the red and white barrier with a hand-written ‘STOP!’ sign that inhibits passing traffic for long enough so that the town’s drop-outs and stragglers to have a good stare at who is passing. Some children sitting in a huge discarded truck tyre swivelled their attention briefly from the silent sandy track of a road to the four of us – me, Frederic, Lokale and Namesek – slurping sweet tea from filthy tin mugs and visibly reinflating after a blood sugar crash brought on by the heat of the day.
