At breakfast we talked about dreams and especially about who sent them. Etukoit had had no dreams and said her ancestors hadn’t been sending any for a while. Lokale added that while it was usually ancestors who sent dreams, occasional more powerful ones come straight from God. Like one he’d had a few years ago, when he’d been a school boarder living in Lodwar. He dreamt all night about his mother who lived far away in the bush and who he hadn’t seen for a long time; his dreams travelled through all the things he admired about her, all the things she’d done for him, all the reasons why he loved her. The next morning as he walked through town he saw her in the street! She’d done the long journey and reached there the evening before, spent time asking if anyone knew where she could find her son Lokale and then spent an uncomfortable night sleeping outside in the middle of town. As he told the story it was clear he still found it amazing and baffling, but he also asked why God couldn’t have made the dream a more direct reflection of what was happening to her that night so he could have gone and brought her to stay with some people he knew in town, as he did on finding her.
On the road the curse of the accelerator pedal kicked in again: we refused a man with a group of students a lift and no sooner had we done so the pedal broke. Having fixed it we tramped on to Lodwar, a slow journey on a terrible road where all you can do is choose between a pothole and a pothole.
I asked Etukoit how a dream like that could have happened and she smiled her wide matriarch smile and replied,
“Your mother’s blood is the same as yours. She loves you more than a father can, and when good or bad things happen to you she feels it in her stomach.”
It melted me. And she also explained about the dream, saying that Lokale’s mother had journeyed with a vision of her son in her head, and the vision had steered his dream. She’s such a wonderful woman, and I asked if she was curious about our place, if she would want the chance to do there what we are doing here. She asked how cold our place is and we told her (very), after which she said definitively that she feared visiting our place because water would surely pour from every place in her body. This based on the account of a Turkana person who’d gone to “a place called Kitale” (nearest non-Turkana town, south, the frontier with ‘down-Kenya’ and a day’s bumpy drive from Lodwar); that person had reported that it was so cold, this non-desert place that nevertheless grows divine tropical fruit, that water had flowed from his nose.
Inside the deliciously cool huge hut, the floor thick with goat, cow and camel hides, we showed the family the Turkwell film on a laptop. They were entranced by the intimate look inside another Turkana ada karin and jumped at similarities with their own lives by singing along to songs they knew, miming familiar things like the Lokai game, the plucking of fur off the hides and especially the dancing. Etukoit kept them all quiet but was brilliantly enthralled and animated. Everyone eatched intently except for one woman with a long nose who Frederic spotted eyeing up Lokale. We told him afterwards but though he smiled he stuck to his principle on romance and marriage which is that “it would be adding a problem to a problem”.
They agreed that the film was ‘truthful’ although we noticed them switch off a bit during interviews where people spoke of hunger and having to walk 5km to a dispensary. I think they must have been thinking that the river looked envious and the goats plump, and that the 5km walk was nothing compared to their own 20km hike. And some of the interviews about charcoal production or livestock herding must to them have been like us listening to someone describing what it is like to put vegetables on one side of a plate, meat on the other, salt and pepper on top, then pick up a fork in the left hand, a knife in the right hand, etc etc. The dullest of everyday routines in other words.
It was time to leave but we did so in a blaze of generosity, especially since it was our last field stop. The wonderful Etukoit got both our straw mats and a huge khaki canvas/tarpaulin to cover her hut in, a big improvement on the ancient UNHCR sheet, tatty and grey like an old man’s y-fronts. She rejoiced and patted it with both hands saying “Ejok! Ejok! Ejok!” [Thank you / very good]. A sufriya went to the second wife and our remaining food supplies to everyone. The mzee asked for a shirt and got a slightly inappropriate black T-shirt of Frederic’s; Lokale jumped to his aid as he squeezed his oily head and body into it like a porpoise. For a few moments his head and raised arms were trapped inside the shirt and all anyone could see was his round stomach, bisected by the belt-like string of white beads that had been fitted in slimmer days, and of course the familiar view of his private parts uncovered by the loosely-slung blanket. Then he popped into view again and we resumed our goodbyes, thank-yous and promises to return.
Nachhukuli squeezes into his new t-shirt
