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.