In November 2011 we made a short visit to see how the Nakapelewoi family were doing after the drought, and in particular to follow the story of Ekure, Etukoit’s little girl who was admitted to the Merlin feeding programme because of her malnutrition and was featured in an Independent on Sunday article. We passed on the update to journalist Emily Dugan who wrote a follow up piece, which is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/appeals/ios-appeal/ios-appeal-food-aid-has-transformed-ekure-into-a-healthy-child-6272059.html
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| Nakapelewoi after the rain |
It was so green, this place we’d last visited in a shocking drought that prompted the article, The Last Camel. The whole landscape and its palette had changed, and with rain still very much present we arrived under dark skies with the background hills looking dramatically purple-headed. We passed a snake on the dust road that led to Nakapelewoi and tried to guess whether that would be a good or a bad sign. Superstition comes to you quickly in Turkana.
When we arrived, Kwee was out collecting aloe vera for a newly
arrived Somali trader and Etukoit was just leaving home with a gourd of sour
camel milk to exchange with the neighbour. She traded it for some maize flour,
scarce and precious at a time when there were few wild fruits to eat. Despite
the new, green life carpeted everywhere, the land’s health and productiveness
had not yet caught up. There were few fruits and berries to gather, the goats
were not yet producing enough milk (or even having babies), and a lot of
Etukoit’s children were still not very well.
The charismatic little boy Ekirekat
– who we call ‘the businessman’ because of his lack of interest in herding and
precociously upright swagger – was pretty battered by malaria. He wasn’t even
able to come out of his hut to see us. He lay in the dark, damp interior,
wrapped in a blanket and fighting fever as best he could. Wanting to hear his
funny little voice again, I asked him to tell me about his favourite goat. “I
had one but my brother finished [ate] it. It was called One Teat”. And then he
put his heavy head down again, the memory of losing One Teat adding even more
weight – poor little thing!
His older brother Longoleko, the one scarred across
the face from Nachukuli’s fury when he lost a goat, was away visiting his
namesake. That man lives far away and is more than a namesake, he’s something
like a ritual guardian, a man to steer Longoleko into manhood and to provide a
different set of advice to that of his father Nachukuli. It’s a long way to go
for a visit but Etukoit explained that Longoleko had really gone because he was
hoping to be given a goat. All possible kinship strings need to be pulled at a
time like this.
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| Etukoit looking worried |
There was an enormous rainstorm while we were there,
one that shook the earth and blanketed the whole place in opaque sheets of
water. The younger girls were the first to drag animal hides over the huts and
round up the skittish goats who, after quite a fluster, were all safely penned
in. Then the family themselves rushed into the hut that had been rainproofed
with hides and huddled around the embers of the morning’s fire. We watched them
settling down to wait out the storm, and I studied the incredible competence of
the unmarried, pubescent girls who do so much here. They grappled
professionally with babies, even offering their tiny breasts to them to suck on,
and managed to quiet them when they started howling, probably because of the
sudden cold and the deafening thunder claps. Aragai is the most brilliant of
these girls, truly her mother Etukoit’s daughter and a close friend of the
older girls who married her brothers.
These active girls sang a song about
drought and laziness, with lines that included, “The old men who play peyeri
will die, the women who only shake the gourds will die…” They also confided in
me that they have a very real hunger for education, even that they don’t want
to follow the lives of their parents for this latest drought has made that no
longer seem viable. None go to school, and it is unlikely that they will be
sent, but somehow they have reached a clear and collective understanding that
for their generation, education is a right and a way of accessing a safer
future.
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| Aragai tying hides and a canvas sheet to the main hut |
“God remembered us!” says Etukoit when I ask how she feels about these long-awaited rains, and she remarks that an emuron [prophet] reassured them that the drought would indeed end. But losses to drought aren’t forgotten: Etukoit holds Ekure close as she remembers how nearly she was lost when she got sick from the wild fruits that were the family’s main food supply; the animals are still not producing enough milk, and so many died in the drought, which came for the third year in a row and didn’t give anyone’s herds a chance to recuperate in between. In many ways this rain is too late: it sickens the family to see all the grass and shrubs springing up now when they have so few animals to feed on it. In many places, this of course is the perfect pretext for raiding – they can’t see the grass unglazed.
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| A wet ada karin [homestead] |
Fears of insecurity are definitely up. For the first time they worried for our safety, and Nachukuli even asked us if we had a gun to protect ourselves with. Cross-border raiding has increased, and they told stories of local herdsboys who wake with a gun to their head and are forced to open the animal enclosure and stay quiet while all inside are driven out and taken by the raiders. Fear is rife, and jealousy too. Aragai was suffering from a bad stomach that the family all agreed was inflicted on her by a local woman known to be an ekapilan [witch]; that woman had seen Aragai returning from town with some maize flour on her head and, jealous, had thrown a curse on the girl’s stomach.
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| Visiting neighbours in the evening |
While we were there, a man came to ask for Nachukuli because a stolen animal had been recompensed with many goats, and one of them would be killed, shared out and eaten. Nachukuli, as an elder, was required to oversee the ritual distribution of meat – very complex, according to clan and age and leopard/stone grouping. But in his classic grumpy old man way, Nachukuli said “Those days are gone, I can’t walk there”, and simply lay back to recline in his old age, barely looking at his visitor through his cataract filled eyes. The man seemed to say something a bit threatening about how this refusal would be received by the other men and Nachukuli replied defiantly, “Only God will kill me.”
After a very wet but thankfully safe night we crawled out of our
puddle-afflicted tent (and sodden foam mattress) and met the family for
breakfast. We offered a bag of mandazis we’d brought on the journey and
Nachukuli made us laugh when he almost squealed, “Why did you have to show them
to those bush men?!?” as we gave some to his elder, herdsboy sons.
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| Nachukuli |
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| Ekure with her favourite dog by the fire |
