Made a big pot of chai for everyone, sitting waiting for it to boil with the lame goat who was trying to get warm. She knows she’s different from the sprightly, impish ones who charge around chasing and play-fighting each other but I don’t think she knows she’s an auspicious omen to be sacrificed in a year or so.
Sat with Aipa, the two translators (Gregory had reappeared looking much better) and another young person on a log, feeling quite the naughty youth as we laughed about donkeys mating. They at last seem to trust me, and complained that I should be planning to marry someone here so that my useful, hard-working children could be added to the family. But I need improving: the other night when I slept through the rain rescue mission it had shown them that I wouldn’t be alert to dangers in the night or able to get up and rush with the rest of them. Felt very ashamed, my deep sleeping and slow waking seem to follow me around the world.
Children joined us and an impromptu clinic started, everyone grabbing long acacia thorns and removing splinters or in one case painfully lancing a toddler’s boil. Older ladies came and we had a long conversation about health and the dispensary, lots of interesting things learnt but most underpinned by a lack of trust in the staff, drugs and services. It’s a shame when politicians and missionaries have so many people here believing everything they say, and voting and praying to prove it, that health professionals can’t apply the same passion to educating people about the basics of something like malaria prevention and treatment; what to do, ask for and expect.
Erot returned and we set off for another ekriam mariam, this time back in the huge Konipad riverbed. The four of us walked across the huge scrubby expanse, dragging our heels and chewing on the esekon – twig toothbrushes – we grabbed from a bush at the start. On one side of us lay the row of hills that look to me like teeth but have names like ‘spear’ and ‘home of the monkeys’ and on the other is the tall but cloud-covered Mount Loima where the herbal perfume (epie) I bought the other day comes from. Erot asked questions about my home and learnt that we usually eat with knives and forks rather than spoons and that a family can move as much in its lifetime as a Turkana one can. The logistics and geopolitics of mine, even simplified, were baffling. We talked about the history of this land, me repeating what I’d uncovered at the British Institute in Nairobi about Turkana people being here for just 250-300 years having been in Sudan before that. Erot said yes, that man was correct, and that Turkana had fought wars to displace people from the land, people whose descendants like the Pokot still resent and fight them.
Having crossed the plain we were at Konipad and at one of the first houses we stopped, toothbrushes still in mouths, to gape at a girl who’d recently stopped speaking. She was young and looked very miserable; I said uselessly that she shouldn’t worry and her voice would surely come back but suspect from their faces that the others had another, grimmer explanation and probably one where a sacrifice would be required to appease whoever her loose tongue had wronged… On we went to where some women were thatching their akai while their children ate the huge dry palm fruit eengol which clever Lokale joked is the Turkana doughnut. One of the women was wearing traditional hide sandals, beautiful, and there was an ugly stepsister moment as one was rammed onto my big foot.
We were early, as usual, and it took a while for the riverbed to fill up and become the bustling market place again. I discovered that instead of sitting upright in a series of awkward, twisted poses I could just lie flat on my back and no-one minded at all. I sat up for a few chats and greeting rituals and then was grateful to be invited to join a group of women rolling string from a shredded fertiliser sack on their calves. Much harder than it looked and they laughed at how inept I was before getting worried by how red my leg was starting to look after they’d spat and rubbed on it furiously for a while. My triumph, after much undoing and starting again, was two pieces of string about a foot long each. It’s amazingly resourceful to make something out of nothing and they use the it for their beautiful bead necklaces but it’s a bit galling to spend so much time on something as basic as string… At my pace of making anyway. More my style was the reed mat-making; I made a nice long green strip of woven reeds and then stitched it to another in what looked like a mermaid’s tail. Of course the best thing was being finally taken in by the happy group of women who laugh, sing, sell busa and bounce babies. Until last night I’d been wondering if I’d ever break through what Kenyan author-photographer Nigel Parvitt describes as Turkana’s famous unfriendliness.
Some time after five we began the three or so kilometres home. To our right the row-of-teeth hills were dazzling in evening sunshine but towards Mount Loima and directly ahead of us the sky was a dramatic and deep blue-grey, pretty furious looking. Knowing what lay ahead, an incredibly fast pace was set, quickened when the warm wind in our faces became cooler, powerful and full of dust. Erot ran back to rescue his youngest wife Marta and their chubby little boy and we three marched on into what was making me think of a biblical plague of locusts. Although my bones seem to be poking out more than usual – hips, ribs and clavicles especially – I was feeling strong, stronger than previously this week, and thinking of how muslims say their bodies adjusts to the rhythm of Ramadan fasting after a week or so (Lokale scoffs at Ramadan and says the fact they eat a huge pre-dawn breakfast means they have it a lot easier than most Turkana people). That was until it started to absolutely pour with rain and we had no choice but to run as fast as we could for at least the last kilometre. It felt like brutal army training but we made it to the ada karin without stopping, looking like drowned rats and me with my thin white shirt plastered to my skin and surely indecent. Tent soaked but in the spirit of shutting the enclosure after the goats have bolted I threw a square of tarpaulin over it, one that I should have attached to it to begin with but decided against because I thought it would be too hot and would block my view of the stars.
Felt a bit miserable as I lay wet in a wet tent and wondered if I couldn’t just pile on the few things in my bag that were still dry, put some plastic over the soaking foam mattress and hope for the best until morning. But the thought of two hungry translators got me up and dragging a dirty pot over to the other huts. Plenty of lightning flashing on the horizon and though the worst of the rain was over it was still drizzling. Lokale called me into the good hut – the one with a roof – and what a world it was in there! With thick thatching all over it and mats and hides covering the floor it was dry and snug and I could see just why the children loved to tumble around in there together. Bowls, plates, spoons and milking containers all carved from wood or from gourds hung all over the tied-twig walls and there was a tin trunk which I suppose holds clothes and valuables. It felt huge inside and in the darkness it took me ages to realise that two children were asleep on the mats. I only had a bag of millet meal to offer for supper but my spirits soared when they told me just to sit down and dry off, that that would prepare and bring the food. In came a pile of epocho, a strong spinach dish, a chapatti-based mush and finally my millet porridge. I threw caution to the wind and stuck my fingers into the communal bowls along with the rest of them, wondering whose were filthier but relishing the taste of grease, soil and general filth holding the lovely hot dishes together. The shallow well water that everything gets washed and cooked in seemed the least of my worries alongside all our streaky fingers and the grimy plates but I ate plenty, remembering that I’ll be in Lodwar tomorrow for the almost-inevitable bout of dysentery. The abundance of supper might have something to do with me buying two lovely wooden bowls, paying probably more than I should have. We talked – headlines being that the new goat had run away and that an ear infection is bothering baby Esibitar (which means born in hospital, and she’s the only one I’ve met) – and then I excused myself and walked to my own shallow well to sleep.
