Travels in Turkana Land

The first bit of travelling that I did in April was to the region west of Lake Turkana, a huge lake in the desert of northern Kenya.  We spent as much time awake on public buses and matatus as we did on the ground, but it was well worth it.  It was exciting because the region is so different from anywhere else that I have been in Kenya.  There are not a lot of tourist sites in the area, which is fine with me, and most of what we did was travel to nearby towns and talk with people we met there.

The access point for the region is Kitale, which is in the northern Rift Valley.  At Kitale Eckhart and I went to a museum of local history.  The museum seemed to basically be someone’s personal collection of Kenyan crafts, most of which Eckhart and I had already seen.  We did learn a few new bits of information, as the picture below highlights.

  Who knew that African paths are characterized by narrowness and meandering?

From Kitale we arrived in Lodwar, the biggest town in the region.  From there we went to Kalokol, which is just 5km from the lake.  There is not a road from Kalokol to the lake.  Eckhart and I found ourselves crossing desert and passing by Turkana herdsmen in our search for the undrinkable water of Lake Turkana.  Along the way we met a hut of Turkana men hiding from the scorching sun.  The hut really belonged to a guard.  Turns out that 50 plus years ago an investor built a huge pipeline from Kalokol to a resort they were building on the lake. Unfortunately the region did not attract very many guests, being located so far away from other tourist infrastructure and the pipeline was never utilized.  Now, an Indian investor has bought the pipeline and is having it deconstructed in order to melt the steel and sell the raw material. 

At the lake there is a community of turkana people.  Traditionally they are pastoralists, but this lake-side community consists of about 200 mostly young turkana (I think the oldest I saw was in their early 40’s, which is very different from the other communities I saw).  There is a refrigerated truck that drives the 20 hours from NRB to the lake in order to buy fish from these people.  The turkana fishermen only have to put out their nets, reel in the catch, eat their fill, and sell the rest to the waiting truck.  It looks like a much easier, and different, life than the turkana that herd goats.

We were ferried to the peninsula that the camp is on by a boat (similar to the one in the above picture).  Below is a picture of boys swimming alongside the boat and a boy imitating my camera. From Kalokol we headed up to Kakuma, a Sudanese refugee camp in Kenya, and Lokichogio, which used to be the headquarters from all relief work in Sudan.  Now that the security situation in Sudan has increased the relief programs have moved inside of Sudan and Lokichogio is left with a great deal of infrastructure and few guests.  Basically, it reminds me of a typical Kenyan town.  I do not know the story of the truck in the picture, but it was parked outside of a very lonely post office and next to a government of Kenya immigration office.  To give a feel for the degree to which the post office is isolated, we were talking to the post master; then he decided to go on break and went to town without closing the door to the post office or leaving any other worker behind. After returning to Lodwar we spent a day walking through the neighborhoods.  On the outskirts of town we came across this graveyard.  If crosses a the head of the grave are a sign, it appears that about a third of the dead were Christian.

Also, we sat under a tree in one of the “suburbs” of Lodwar and chatted with the locals.  Some of them were very friendly and showed us around.  I don’t know how, but somehow they got the idea that because we are teachers we are coming to Lodwar to build a school.  They made sure to outline the prices and availability of land as well as introduce us to a few students and wazee (old men).

The traditional turkana men wear a circular knife around their wrist, they always carry a walking stick, and the majority of them carry a small stool (although this man does not have it).

The women usually wear beads around their necks and more than half of them cut their hair into mohawks.  According to me, this combination makes them some of the most beautiful women in Kenya.

Then we returned to Eldoret, passing through a national park created for the preservation of a now seemingly extinct variety of antelope. 

From there Eckhart and I headed our separate ways, and I had a peaceful ride back to my site, other than being stranded on a matatu that broke down for three hours.

April – Break After the Third Term

I know that I have always been an irregular blogger, sometimes not blogging for 2+ weeks, and some days (like today) writing three posts.  All the same, I feel an obligation to say that you may not hear from me for a while. 

This month is our break from teaching and on Saturday I am heading up to lake Turkana, which is in Northern Kenya. 

After that I will be in Nairobi for the volunteer advisory committee meeting and the diversity and peer support meeting, as well as session and training.

Then I will be visiting another volunteer’s site to talk about ways to teach meditation in our schools.

Here are also a couple pictures you might enjoy.  The first two are from a trip that I took to the forest with Mr. Gitonga (mathematics teacher at Athiru Gaiti) and Mr. Ndreba (board of governors’ teacher in physics, mathematics, and agriculture at Athiru Gaiti).  I think you can tell in one of the photos that I did not feel well.  In fact it was very unfortunate because we had been planning this trip for sometime.  The good thing is that I got some medicine to destroy all of those pesky food-borne viruses from my system and now I feel great!

The forest is government property and you are only allowed to go there if you have permission from the police.  It is about 8-10km from town, and is the source of the water for most of the region around Maua.

Below is a picture of a table at Athiru Gaiti primary school that is built around a tree.  How cool!

Book Review: It’s Our Turn to Eat

It’s Our Turn to Eat is a book written by Michela Wrong about John Githongo.  John helped lead the Kenya branch of Transparency International, and in 2002 when Kibaki became president was invited to participate in the government by advising the directly advising the president on how to fight corruption.

During his time in State House (the president’s office, where John’s office was also located), it came to light that the government had continued to sign contracts with companies that had not bid on the contract for “nearly three and a half times as much as the lowest bid.”  In all, there are 18 of these contracts were estimated by the auditor general to be worth a total of $751 million.  Further, they the contracts specified that they be paid using irrevocable promissory notes to ultimately unknown sources. 

6 of the contracts were signed during 2003-2004.  During this period the foreign aid to Kenya was $521 million.  Another comparative statistic is that the money paid on the contracts “would have been enough to supply every HIV-positive Kenyan with anti-retrovirals for the next ten years.”

John Githongo used a wire-tap to record conversations of ministers and high-level government officials talking about the corruption they were participating in.  He started to get threats from the top of the government on his life, prompting him to take political asylum in Britain and release his evidence from there.

This man dedicated all of his energy into trying to stop Kenyan corruption.  He released the evidence to newspapers and offered it to the Kenyan government several times.  In return, nothing has changed.  None of the officials implicated have been prosecuted.  Instead, the same officials continue to steal.

Another Peace Corps volunteer wrote a blog article about How Does Corruption Affect Volunteers.  In it, he cites an article stating that the British government is withholding $30 million that was supposed to go towards education because of evidence that officials in the ministry for education are stealing the money.  That is money that could send students to school, improve classrooms, bring electricity to schools, or provide hygienic toilets for the students.

Library Project

I can tell that English is the most difficult aspect of school for my students.  All of their course work other than kiswahili is in English, yet most of them did not really start learning English until grade 3, 4, or 5.  I have been trying to encourage them to read for fun to help them improve their comprehension, but it is difficult when books are so rare and coveted.

That is why I talked to the chairman of the constituency development fund about getting money for our school to build a library. 

Aside: The constituency development fund can be compared to pork-barrel spending, except that here is is directly accounted for in the budget and each constituency is allocated an equal amount of money.  In my opinion it is capable of being a much more functional system than writing spending clauses into unrelated bills.  That is, if it is used properly and if money is not skimmed off of the top through corruption.   

Now our library is almost complete and I have also been fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a multi-school book donation project that has been developed by my good friend and “neighbor,” Matt Palma, as well as two returned Peace Corps volunteers.

They (and now we) are working with Books For Africa to bring an entire container of books from America to Kenya.  The container holds about 20 thousand books, and each school will keep approximately five thousand.

Now the library structure is almost complete and the books are slated to arrive around the end of June or the start of July.

Commenting!!! - Settings May Have Changed

I think that I just changed the setting on the blog so that it will be 95% easier to comment. It only took me about a year to stumble upon the area where I change the settings.

I may never have conclusive evidence if I failed, since no one will be able to comment about how difficult it still is to leave comments.

How to Be Idle

There is a book titled, How to Be Idle. I think that it is supposed to be a joke, and honestly I have never read it. A Peace Corps friend of mine has it though and she told me that one of the suggestions is to take tea for an hour.

The other day I was supposed to show up for an end of term staff party at noon. I showed up at 1pm. The reason: As I was leaving my house someone invited me for tea and I took tea for an hour.

How should I interpret this? The thing is, I showed up to the staff party an hour late and I was the fourth person (out of ten) to arrive. If taking tea for an hour is a way to be idle, what about taking tea for two hours?

As I was walking to the party I kept laughing at myself. These days I have all but given up trying to adopt Kenyan culture, but it looks like I have been here long enough that I am unconsciously doing it.