We met this guy halfway between Marsabit and Kargi, seventy kilometres from any semblance of a road - or a tree. Between Lucy, who speaks a bunch of languages that I had no idea still existed, and Paul, who speaks the remaining ones, they had enough Rendille to find out that he had been walking from two days and that he hadn't eaten anything in a day or had any water. He went through a litre and a half in about half the time it took to write this sentence. He freaked out my chairman, Pauline, because he didn't speak Swahili, he wouldn't pretend to even like our World Vision Land Cruiser, and because he had another two days walk before he found his manyatta, somewhere well beyond Kargi where we were headed.
This was in 2008, just after Kibaki's government had pulled down its pants and gotten in bed with the Chinese sugar daddy, before the roads became the thing we remembered Mwai Kibaki for. From Isiolo to Archer's Post to Laisamis to Marsabit was a seven-hour, dust-filled, rock-strewn you-need-a-Land-Rover trek that required a shiatsu massage on either end or one could do themselves a terrible injury. It was hot and lonely and if it was not for the occasional Burji-owned lorry ferrying goats to Kiamaiko, we were the only ones on that two hundred and fifty kilometres. Not even the UNICEF team we had seen that morning was in sight.
Marsabit remains the largest administrative region in Kenya, all 70,000+ square kilometres of it. And the sun scorches every inch of it. Harshly. It's as if God has a magnifying glass between the sun and the volcanic-rock-strewn lunar-like surface of Marsabit county. Watering points are few and far between. And herds of camels are commonplace.
I remember his stoic, what-will-be-will-be-look as we waited for Ngala and Mwangi to replace the ruined Land Cruiser's rear left wheel. It was happenstance that we happened by and if we chose to leave him behind it would be no skin off his nose. We gave him a lift, despite my boss's irrational fear that he would turn his shiny rungu on us, to a point maybe thirty kilometres off the track we were following and he took a bead on the sun, shrugged his shoulders, raised his rungu in thanks and headed off into the vast, harsh unknown. I wonder what he became. I wonder what he did. Does he still do three day treks across that vast county without food or water on him?
1 comment:
I wonder if anything has changed in the area since then. Has the free electricity reached the neighborhood primary school? Was there even a primary school in a radius of about 100km?
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