Slept badly through plenty of noises: a grasshopper chirping near my head that had to be caught and evicted; Emzungu vomiting his guts out, placenta presumably; and the poor abandoned baby goat bleating for love and milk the whole night long. The morning’s goat and sheep sorting was complex and involved removing those very close to delivery – now quite a few – from the main flock that head for far-off places. Anna talked with me as I made chai; she and Marta are far the most animated and attractive women about, and I was pleased to receive a dynamic lesson in domestic vocabulary before she left to milk the camels, taking with her a handsome ilipit (wood-carved milking container, thin and tube-like and almost a foot long). We followed, up the laga, and laughed at Erot when he took us to a big ekalele tree he’d dreamed was covered in fruit and found its branches empty.
For the camel milking I had to wrap myself in a black sheet to hide my offensive white shirt, but still they worried that the camels would jump the thorn fence if I went in with them. Avoiding the ‘angry ones’ Anna and another milking lady brought out a 12-year old mother and showed me how to milk. You rest the ilipit on your raised knee and pump one of the four teats with your whole hand. I was terrible and couldn’t produce a drop, and the sensation made me squirm a little (plus the animals smelt terrible). The bare-chested older milking lady had a wiry, well-lived look and as I looked from her face to the camel’s I was sure I saw more and more how they resembled each other, as dogs and their owners so often do too.
Home past Aipa’s place where one of the herdsboys had flu and I dispensed some Panadol. Aipa served us sour milk porridge, the sort Lokale loves and could drink gallons of, and then offered me her husband since we are now good friends and it is good to share him. Too embarrassed to look at him, Erot’s first son and by far the most strapping man in the area (probably because he sometimes works as a policeman and so earns and eats well), I refused and they laughed and didn’t mind at all. Aipa is the least traditionally dressed and looked very exotic today in a bright pink sheet, pink plastic flip-flops, pink earrings and hair braided in short, tight corn rows rather than shaved with a path left down the middle. It was nice to see her being smiley and flirtatious with her alpha male husband; she got a better deal than Irene who in the evenings serves food glumly to her silent husband as he reclines Roman emperor-style on his mat, and who seems completely alone with her whinging baby except for the help of her father-in-law’s two older wives.
At home Elizabeth was still worried about the boil on the back of her head and with the help of Mary (wife two) was covering it in a series of layers: animal fat, ground herbs, a silky little patch of fine cloth woven by a spider in an eengol frond, and then lots of Mary’s spit. I couldn’t help feeling a little worried for her as I saw this, and contrasting the procedure with the sterile, careful and high-cost injection received by the goat with the dry skin on its nose. Finally she covered her head with a scarf to keep the sun off it and set about finishing her roof.
Off to the river with the goats; Erot had to turn back half way to take home one who kept running into bushes trying to deliver. She must have been missed in the morning’s filter where they listen to the cry and look at the udder to see how close birth is.
One our way across the scrub, in the blinding heat, we passed a human skull. Not a prehistoric hominid fossil despite this place being so famous for them, but the remains of a recent visitor from far-away Kongol. The man had gone to Turkwell to see a famous emuron about his health, but it hadn’t worked and his friends were left to carry his dead body home. They found it too heavy and left it in the bush under branches; now all that was left was a bleached skull facing the sky and a few bigger bone fragments scattered around where hyenas must have dropped them. So still no evidence that Turkana care for their non-immediate neighbours…
The river was rushing fast, brown like chocolate, and it was a pleasure to walk under the tall trees to reach it. Erot was more nervous with his fleet of ready-to-pop goats, especially when a monkey made the alert cry he associates with a wild cat or other predator being nearby. We made it there and back with the herd intact and even had the chance to chew on deliciously sweet eengol palm fruits before spitting out the dry, indigestible fibre. This carbohydrate certainly keeps people going, and can be eaten in various ways according to its ripeness, but it makes you feel thirsty and even tired in the limbs… Still, an amazing tree the eengol, people eat its fruits but also weave mats and baskets, thatch houses, make fastening ties, goat headcollars, skipping ropes and much more from its fronds. May it long remain for them to use.
At the afternoon’s meeting held at Nanye one of the first guests to arrive dangled a scorpion in front of a shy busa-selling lady’s face to frighten her. Which it did. Then we all examined it and I answered the usual questions about whether such things are also in my place. Two men in wedding hats arrived, felt caps well plumed with ostrich feathers – black ones mainly, a couple of more precious white ones on each, and even a magenta pink one that looked straight out of the Peter Jones’ haberdashery department. Erot told me that the last time ostriches were here was in the 1970s, finished off by the arrival of guns (probably over the Ugandan border, fall-out from Idi Amin’s days and their closure). That said I’ve only seen one gun here, owned by a headman who moonlights as a member of the Kenya Police Reserve, guns for hire who can escort vehicles through insecure areas and do god knows what else. More traditionally, a man sharpened his walking stick with the tip of his double-ended spear and asked about aeroplanes and my mother tongue. Many people have asked if I have a mother tongue besides English, as all Kenyans do, and they look very pitying when I say no so that culturally I feel very impoverished.
We left early for me to catch the Merlin lift back to Lodwar for a couple of days. As we walked and burnt in the sun we came across a goat that had that very second delivered a slimy newborn. She was doing a brilliant job of pushing it into the shade of the epu bush but Erot picked it up and took it to the other side of the bush; as the afternoon went on the shade would get longer rather than shorter on that side, which would keep the little thing safe until its owners came and found it. The act of a true neighbour I thought.
