We woke early and listened to the camels and the goat version of a dawn chorus. Like yesterday we were presented with a good sized ilipit container of thick white camel milk which we tasted in cautious sips and then boiled into a much improved tea. In an extension to a conversation yesterday we all had fun discussing and depicting the ‘Turkana kangaroo’ that is seen every so often and is much feared. I did an impression of the Australian version hopping with a joey and a long tail, while they did theirs. Which was a standing animal that walked on two legs until someone was looking at it, then switched to one leg; that could scoop up its shortish tail in its hand to keep it clear off the floor; and that stalked humans hoping to eat one of their eyes. Children were frightened of being got by it at night and a local man had apparently been terrified a month ago when one had come right into his hut as he slept.
We drove to the neighbour’s ada karin by the road, with its bags of charcoal ready for roadside trade. He was to take us to the mountain to see the medicinal herbs but was in town so we met his wife instead and watched her preparing edupal, the green peas we’d eaten yesterday. She was heavily pregnant and surrounded by many children peeling quite a hoard of the fruits. It was a productive little place, with more people in the laga gathering esekon fruits and the famously bitter edung that has to be boiled all day.
A little herdsboy in a bright green sheet took us to the nearby emoru (mountain) to explain the use of herbs. He sat on black rocks under a magenta pink desert rose explaining how he collects echuchukwa (aloe vera) and emus (a spidery looking cactus flat on the floor) for his father’s bad stomach or if someone has a racing heart. They seem preoccupied with heart rate here; so many have scars on their chests and particularly their left pectoral muscle, and apparently when they think someone’s heart has become broken and stopped working they beat it with rolled up cloth until the person coughs to prove the heart is fixed. Just hearing the descriptions made me feel a bit funny, the thought of having my heart beaten makes me squeamish, probably stirring up memories of seeing Mesoamerican cultures or Indiana Jones characters rip pulsing hearts out of opened chests…
Desert Rose
The desert rose had an interesting use: when a wild animal like a hyena or maybe a kangaroo has eaten a goat, you take some of its bark, grind it and leave it where the hyena will return to feed on the goat remains. It acts as a poison apparently, and will even kill that thieving hyena.
We drove to a ridge to see the ada karin from up high and to look across the moonscape with its mountains, rock formations and termite mounds like index fingers pointing at the sky. A little camel herder followed us all the way, keeping behind the lurching landrover as it picked its way like a beetle across the bumpy landscape. Trying to record birdsong was an adventure, not very successful, but we managed to find and film some birds to match the first wife’s stories of lucky and unlucky birds who appear and have to be welcomed or stoned as appropriate.
The family sang songs while everyone ate, songs about the frogs that pre-empt rain or the giraffes that used to be here until they were hunted out because their tails were sought after as hairy wrist ornaments to be flicked during dancing. And in the darkness women traced out the kinship links of the ada karin by carrying burning logs from one hearth to the other, glowing orange flares that were the only light besides the stories.
