Maji

I've said already it gets dry here. Roads crack, fields turn brown and even baboons start appearing on ever higher ground each day, escaping the even more severe drought down in the lowlands.

The other day I Mwakitau, a good way on the lowlands towards to border of Tanzania, we stopped for a soda when on our way to the market in Taveta for shopping (you can guess if that was my idea or not: it’s more than a three-hour drive there). An old lady sat down next to me in the shade and started conversing in a low voice and in a language I only understand a few words of. But I think I asked her about the weather and whether or not there had been any rain around. It goes without saying that I didn't understand the answer, but the length and tone of it said more than a thousand understood words.

The cliche of water being the very essence of life and death takes a whole new weight for a guy from a place like where I am from in a place like this. Drought, flooding and all other problems related with H₂O are for a University student in Helsinki little more than theoretical issues and headlines in the pages on foreign news in the newspaper, however concerned each and every one might be on a personal level.

Even at the station, which is way better equipped in these matters than most buildings in Wundanyi, we ran out of water just at the end of October. For me, that only added to the exotics of being away (bottled drinking water can always be bought, although at a high price for local standards, from the market) and gave an excuse to not bother taking showers every day, but it tells volumes of how badly off many other households around here are. No rain means no water means not only lack of hygiene and drink but also future lack of food. It was put with shocking calm to me: ‘One year from now, you can expect famines around here’.

It wasn't always this bad. There used to be big dams both in Wundanyi and Mwatate, courtesy of the colonial government, providing water for many purposes throughout the year. Then something happened. Independence came, and people understandably wanted to get rid of features representing or reminding of the colonial times, however useful they were. Children drowned in the dams. So they were emptied and converted to farmland and very productive farmland indeed. Only that now, once things get dry, the dams are not there to provided water anymore. No more buffer for hard times. Rational behavior at first glance? Yes. Understandable feelings and solutions based on them? Yes. Long-term planning?

There it comes

And then the rains came properly one Wednesday, when I was again left “alone” as the only guest on the station. Now they come not with occasional sound of thunder, but with a constant rumbling for tens of minutes. They come with plenty of warning (the sound, the sudden darkness, the hot wind, the smell) just minutes ahead of the first drops, and they come hard.

Brown turns to green, dust turns to mud. Roads get slippery, shoes and socks get ruined and off this author goes, skipping through higher terrain to find cheap boots at the market. One shower surprised on me on a run, and I’m not exaggerating too much when I say I really had to work hard to climb up the slopes from a valley in which I didn't want to be at the moment.

In addition, they come with blackouts to add some effect to the feeling, which is annoying since I do have some office-work to do and no, I don’t have one of those fancy laptops that work even when not plugged in.

What I don’t get, is that the next morning everything is as if there had been no rain. You still hear people complaining about the lack of rain. The puddles of mud don’t stick around for days, as they would back home. The clouds, the moisture and all other signs of rain disappear just as quickly as they appeared, and dust is back. Thirsty land?

Not thirsty enough, it appears, since ironically the rains are, when they come, even too hard. Instead of irrigation for shambas, you get floods, erosion and further impoverished soils. Nature has a really cruel and twisted sense of humor around here!

Sunday

I’m on the countryside here, which I’m not used to being in for longer periods. Time get’s a bit slow at points.

Today is Sunday, and religion is a big thing here, even though it’s not as blatantly expressed as for instance in West Africa. I don’t see posters advertising for foreign celebrity preachers visiting here (maybe because I'm on the countryside?) and I’m not asked for my home church or to go to church every week, but still: you can hear it, see it and feel it.

The town is empty and quiet, everything is closed. The usually crowded and, considering the size of the town, remarkably noisy Matatu station is now almost like in a ghost town, there’s just a few of us wondering what all the few others are even doing there. On top if it all it’s as hot and pressing as it can get here during the sunny days in the rainy season, which is hot. So I keep expecting young Clint Eastwood to appear from around the corner with something between his teeth. One more experience for me...

The Wild West illusion lasts as long as you manage to keep your ears shut. Sunday is the day of church, but that also means that it is the day of music. It’s not all good gospels, as one might think or hope, but it is music in all its forms, loud and clear, coming for at least two different, more or less hidden sources in each concentration of dwellings. Taking a long walk along empty roads through empty villages but still hearing music all the time has to be one kind of a simulation of the more disturbed form of hearing noises.

I haven’t visited any of the churches here, because I don’t think they are considered to be as much tourist attractions here as in Europe, and I’m afraid I would feel a lot out of place. Maybe one of these lonely Sundays… There’s a limit as to how much I can walk around, run around, cycle around, or drive around. Or read, write or watch movies and series.

Did I mention already that it’s really hot?

But now I’m of course exaggerating. In the afternoons, bars will open and it seems that the limited population of Wundanyi moves from the surprisingly many religious establishments to the surprisingly many places showing the English Premier League. That’s where you get to be bored without having to complain about it. No thinking about what to do, just watching! That's my kind of Sunday activity, so I join them.

During the weekdays, the human world of sounds is, surprisingly and against all odds, dominated by Islam. That’s what you hear when you wake up and when you go to bed: the muezzin. There’s a mosque, apparently with Metallica-class loudspeakers, on a nearby hill, and they're building a new one next to the prison, whatever the symbology of that is supposed to be. New, well built mosques and the right to daily (many times a day, actually) call to prayers that is forbidden in most of Europe, only for a handful of people in a very Christian community, in a country where religious tensions have been in the minds of everybody maybe more than anywhere else in the world (Think Westgate, to begin with). Why? The explanation I've got, being probably a parted one, is that the Muslim community here is really good at playing the general concern of repression for their benefit. All claims for more mosques to be built or any other rights are backed by claims of repression based on religion, and that is actually taken seriously here. This might of course be a consequence of a near history and a perceived threat of outright religious violence in the country. Or it might be the workings of foreign funders, wanting to spreads Islam. One friend calls them crusaders... Or could this just be a form of surprising tolerance?

Just to point out, the Muslims I have actually met have not been different from their neighbors in any way, their faith has only been found out by asking.

Ms. G – Talkin’ to People

October turned to November and I’ve probably given out the impression that I haven’t been doing a lot of useful stuff here. Well, actually I have.

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Target a household/business premise, invite yourself in, ask for permission to interview, ask for permission to record, ask your questions, note down coordinates (where you really are), maybe have a short chat, present your gratefulness, leave, target another household/business premise. Repeat 3-7 times. That’s how my usual day has looked like so far. It’s been fun.

There’s been lots of giggling because of silly questions, lots of awkward silence because of weird question, plenty of misunderstandings. But zero hostility, even though I was expecting some, asking questions under a pretty sensitive theme.

The easiest interviews are with the ones who speak either good English or no English. In the former case it feels like a normal discussion, in the latter one I get to off easy by just presenting the original questions as they appear on paper and let my friend do the explaining. Most problems are encountered when people bravely try to make it through with less than perfect English skills, forcing me to ask each question differently many times. I’m sure this is what I’ve been asking for by not preparing my questions well enough (Can it ever be done well enough?), and it’s good training also for me, but still… You might be tired, it’s really hot… You get the picture.

I think I’ve done quite enough of interviews because not many new answers come up anymore, so here’s a short, gut-feeling, mini-analysis of the answers:

• Everyone interviewed actually has a toilet, something that is not self-evident in the region. Some people do claim however that not everyone in the community have toilets.

• Almost all toilets are pit latrines, which is a ‘dump, cover and forget’- solution. You dig a pit and when it’s full you cover it and gig another one. It serves well for keeping the surrounding clean and preventing the spread of diseases, which is why it is being advocated by for instance the health authorities, Plan International and World Vision. But it also leaves all the nutrients unused and unavailable as well as makes possible the contamination of ground water. And at one point people just have to run out of land to dig pits in, right?

• Farming as the only occupation in a household is very common. Nearly everyone farms something, although it is an unpredictable practice due to weather patterns, in order to not be dependent on a single income and being vulnerable to changes in life.

• No-one around uses human waste to improve the soil conditions on farms, although organic wastes and animal manure are widely used. Using industrial fertilizers is not very widespread because it is too expensive.
• The waste that is not used as manure is burned since a collection system does not exist except for some scrap buyers around the towns.

• Not many people oppose the idea as such of using human excreta to improve soil conditions. It is not used, according to the interviews, simply because of a lack of skills and technology to do so.

The last one is crucial significant, as sub-Saharan Africans are in literature generally considered to be against all contact with human excreta (the term is faecophobic) as opposed to for instance to Asians (who would then be faecophilics, which sounds a lot more perverse than it really is). What needs to considered here is of course that answering ‘yes, I could consider that’ is easy whereas it doesn’t really tell you that people would actually be using piss and poo on their farms. Would people eat/buy the products? Would restaurants serve them?

And here are some of my favourite answers, freely (!?) translated:

‘Yeah, I don’t think my family sh*its enough for it to be of any use to us...’

‘Well, I have to be happy with my toilet because I built it and I clean it!’

‘I want a flush toilet. Flush! FLUSH!’ [yelling at the recorder] Later Mwadime confirmed my suspicion that this man had had some happy-liquid.

‘We have no sources of income’, when the smell in the house and the respondents condition made clear that he was actually running a not very small factory of that happy-liquid.

And the one I’ve been expecting to come along way more often: “You can have people do whatever you want with their sh*t, as long as you stay away from my shamba (garden/farm) with it!”

Next, I’m going to be moving on to the maybe harder and more interesting part of the field work: Finding out, getting a grip of and talking to people that might be thought to know something about these things in the bigger picture. Expert interviews I will call them. I’ll start easy and consider anyone working in government, waste management, agriculture, forestry or NGOs an expert.

And just because I found a fun new tool: There’s a poll to the right: Do you consider yourself faecophobic or faecophilic? Please think about it, answer and even motivate or comment if you like. I’m yet to answer it myself.

Ms. G – Why Talk to People

October turned to November and I've probably given out the impression that I haven’t been doing a lot of useful stuff here. Well, actually I have.

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How you get information about stuff is a big number in higher education. That’s what methodology courses are all about. The most complicated and detailed methods might serve their purpose in many empirical, “The Big Bang Theory”-science, but as for the rest of us, to most questions we have someone somewhere already has the answer to.

At least that’s the thought I’ve been following with Ms. G.

Development geography and development studies in general always (should) strive to solving problems, either by simply identifying and explaining them or coming up with solutions. As was maybe to some extent explained earlier, I’m working under the second heading. Now, I believe (on the basis of a not insignificant amount of hours of reading) with most other people that emphasis in coming up with these solutions should be put on the views, experiences and preferences of the final users of the solutions.

It often surprises me, and maybe many others, how many times past development aid has failed or even done some more damage only because the right people apparently were not asked the right questions or were not listened to carefully enough. A classic example (that first came to my notice through Dambisa Moyo) is when bed nets (protecting from mosquitoes and therefore malaria) were imported from the west to a tropical country without realizing that there is an enterprise already working on this at the location. Yes, protection from malaria was probably improved and less people fell sick in the short run. But lots of people were put out of work in the bed net business, pushing them into poverty. A would-be industry was destroyed by taking away its markets. And people were made more dependent on aid instead of local production. Plenty of money is lost in the ‘business’ of aid on completely wrong ways of doing things, leading to huge inefficiency and corruption (that last one just some guesswork of mine). These things could be avoided by, yet again, asking [the right people what they think] before doing.

My thing here is no exception. If anything, the toilet business is a field where the preferences of users is most important in making sure that someone is actually going to use any solutions you come up with! Just consider yourself (at least those back in the north) being introduced to a very new way of handling your products, for instance changing from sitting to squatting and from flushing to shoveling.

This is why I start by simply ask people, however differently I might formulate it in the final thesis.

But of course it’s not that simple. A frustrating amount of time goes to deciding what questions to ask, how to formulate them and in which order to ask them so that you won’t be leading the guy/gal to answer the questions he/she might think you want to hear. Or so that the interviewee won’t get the impression that you are ready to offer those solutions or any other tangible benefits here and now, which is a problem especially when talking about human development within a generally poor population. Everyone needs or wants something (a tree seedling, cash to pay for school fees, or your camera), and however well you try to appear informal (dressing very casually, using simple terms for things, which is especially fun under my theme), you are seen, in my case somewhat incorrectly, as a powerful man with connections and as a potential resource for the people.

Being the lazy b*astard I am, I didn't learn any Swahili before coming here (not that even all locals speak it very well…), so my lack of skills forces me to use an interpreter/assistant/friend in my work. This comes with many issues to consider, which anyone can imagine or look up themselves, but in short: Who is really conducting the interview when (this is a real, if single, example) you’re question is a short sentence, the translation of the question is short, the original answer takes a couple of minutes and the translated answer is a simple, pithy: ‘No.’? This is usually signed for, most of the time probably correctly, with the fact that people sometimes just like to ramble along more than a bit outside the theme.

This also comes along with ethical issues that I don’t have the energy to consider in this text, maybe later… Another story for another day is also the questions they come up with.

The City of No One

Nairobi skyline

No city can probably match the possibilities provided to private security companies offered by Nairobi. It’s crowded, chaotic and very informal in all possible senses.

Although the city is often mentioned as a symbol of colonial city planning, it feels as if Nairobi wasn't basically designed at all. No settlement worth mentioning existed at the site until 1898, when a British engineer building the railway line from Mombasa towards the great lakes decided to camp in the middle of nowhere, in what happened to be the last flat spot, to take time to plan the way ahead down to the Rift Valley.  So the city can’t be accused of being all that ‘African’ and therefore less than perfect. It was designed and built from scratch by Europeans. And it was never planned to become the metropolis it did. It was meant to be a small, possibly temporary base for railway building across the wilderness. Still, in little more than a century, it has grown to a stereotypical Third World City with all the accompanying problems and three million inhabitants.

The fact that Nairobi has grown way too big compared to how it is designed (as have so many other cities around the world) means that there’s simply too much people around with no housing or a formal, regular income. This, as was known as early as by the ancient Romans (really love to say that!), causes problems, especially when we’re talking about a young population. They get along best as they see. At best, this means an oversupply of all possible services, legal and illegal, formal and informal, needed and not needed. You wont find yourself desperately looking for a taxi, you will be ripped to pieces (a friend calls them Vultures) by the ones keeping watch on the street once you step out from your hotel. Almost the same applies to anything you might ever want to buy. Where is the Maasai Market? No worries, you’re already dragged in that direction.

At worst, this means lots of crime. You cannot avoid being constantly reminded to mind yourself. There are guards and metal detectors at the entrance of every mall and hotel in the favor of tourists, and I've understood this was the case even before the events of last month. Personally, I've had zero experience of crime during two brief stays in the city, so common sense should get one through, but the atmosphere speaks for itself.

The CBD

The sense of trouble and a quick pulse is boosted by the architecture that is a disconnected blend of western skyscrapers and concrete giants that look like they've been both drawn and built in great hurry to serve the growing city. Everything is so dense that you can’t really get a good look at the city from within or describe it in any useful way.

Guesthouse in Posh Nairobi

The threat of crime is not very surprising since one could say that there’s a demand for it. The main entrance roads outside the city, far away from the noise and dirt of the CBD, are lined with posh, high-end residential areas, classical gated communities where outsiders have no business to enter for. The newer ones look like the setting of the TV series Weeds and in the older ones, built during colonial times, you will not know if you’re in Kenya or Kent. This highlights the fact that Nairobi, while located in a very poor country, has a very high density of very rich people. And everyone understands what such contrasts among a dense population bring about.

Kibera, viewed cowardly from the outside

Then there are places like Kibera. Many foreigners (or other residents of Nairobi, for that matter), me included, seldom consider going there. It has a reputation on par with the favelas of Rio de Janeiro when it comes to violence, criminality and misery. What makes Kibera worth mentioning is not its bad conditions as such, but that it is said to embody the great underlying problem of Nairobi. Since it was bred by Europeans, it is not seen as the home of any single one of Kenya’s many ethnic groups. Blend in also considerable groups of European and Indian ethnicity. All are immigrants and no single group has deep roots in the city or the surrounding area. If Kumasi is the city of the Ashanti, and posh Cape Town a city of the white, Nairobi is the city of no one. Given a history, both distant and recent, of conflicts between these groups, this means that social cohesion, networks and capital, on which many African communities strongly rely on, are extremely weak. So even forms of informal social security are very hard to find.

Still, Nairobi is definitely worth a visit but maybe not a longer stay.

PS. Apparently the government is doing something in Kibera: There is a housing project in Kibera, building proper housing in large concrete buildings for the residents of shacks to move into. The new problem is apparently that once residents of the area are awarded (don’t ask how they’re chosen…) one of these ‘better homes’, they sometimes don’t move in themselves but instead rent the flat out for great revenue. Informally, of course. Again, scramble for scarce resources.

Conflicts and conservation

’Norsu!’, Mwadime suddenly exclaimed, pointing his finger at the middle of the burning hot road between Mwatate and Voi, where there were definitely no elephants. Actually, he was pointing at the brown pile of waste on the middle of the road, which testified that ‘norsu’ (or ndovu in Swahili) had been there that night, where it definitely should not have been.

In the Taita Hills, wildlife is close by. The drier, lowland part of Taita Hills around the town of Mwatate is surrounded by wildlife parks. This is where the elephants should be spending their time, tranquilly chewing away at trees and bushes. But drought affects everyone’s and everything’s lives. When the parks are dry, the elephants are driven by instinct out of them in order to survive. This is when they clash with humans. Lots of people have lost whole harvests of maize and papaya because of the famous beasts. In a situation where people are pushed to the edge of their livelihood, it is quite normal that efforts by wildlife associations to protect the culprits are not always well understood or appreciated. In these circumstances, the rare act of actually taking an elephant life has much more to it than being greedy poaching, as it is often portrayed. Everyone understands the natural and even economical value of having spectacular wildlife around, but this will not replace any harvests.

But even the fact that the animals leave the parks cannot be attributed only to natural factors. The first problem, I've understood, is bad surveillance. The local wildlife service has proper funds and high quality equipment, but one local noted that they still seem to be more interested in one daytime drink after another, instead of actually steering animal movements. Whether this is a slight exaggeration or not, they’re clearly generally not doing a good job.

Meanwhile, a bit to the north, both even worse drought and a raging human conflict are driving people, namely Somalis, south. Now, they’re here. All of these are not the Somalis we tend to think of in Europe, poor and disadvantaged in many ways. Some of the ones that have wandered south bring along great herds of livestock with them and should therefore be considered notably wealthy. The institutions managing the parks being what they are, that wealth means access to best grazing lands, even within the national parks. These newcomers cause insecurity and anxiousness among the elephants, adding to the pressure on them to leave the park.

So: human conflict far away causes pressures on human populations, leading to migration into new areas. Weak institutions and corruption in these areas allow the new populations to disturb the balance between human settlements and the surrounding nature. This causes a new conflict, this time between man and nature, generation pressure on and migration of animals, leading to one more human-nature conflict between animals and the original population. In short, both people and nature ‘suffer through the inevitable conflicts that occur when people scramble for scarce resources’, whether livestock or arable land. (LINK to Wangari Maathai: The Challenge for Africa)

It’s a great example of how many factors, both human and natural, mingle to form one big problem, which no-one really knows how to solve. That’s a lot of components of geography at work for you!

And of course, there are people around that act as if having all the answers and too often are listened to. Then there are people around that clearly have good answers but are seldom asked for them. These are big contemporary issues especially in lowland Mwatate, so I've come to talk about them with more than just a few people. What many people note, is that the only ones to get along with wildlife, living in balance with it and conserving it, are the ones that have been doing so for no one knows how long: the Maasai, who apparently have always been stubborn enough not to be influenced by anyone, keeping to their own, good ways. The nomadic lifestyle probably isn't something for the most of us, but still, might there be any lessons to learn there?

Geoxplosion

Some geography, just because it seems appropriate to describe the surroundings...

The Taita Hills are a collection of mountains (I really don’t know whether to call them small or big. The Highest peak, Vuria, rises to 2200 meters, but then again the surrounding plain lies at about 700 meters) located approximately at 3°25’S, 38°20’E. The hills are part covered in fields and part in cloud- and rain forests. It’s said to be one of the important biodiversity hotspots in Africa.

The area around the hills is good old Lion King Land: a dry savannah where you should be able to find all those iconic animals. I bet one of the cliffs down there is where Simba was first presented to his future subjects (much like what has happened lately in Britain and Sweden...) Great Safari-country that is!

So there’s a general and not surprising tension between the (relatively) green, fertile, humid, prosperous and developed hills on the one hand and the red-and-brown, dry and barren plains, where people are said to be relying on food aid, on the other. The hills with their forests have been described (somewhere here) as natural ‘water towers’, serving as the source of local rivers. Now, due to climate change, God or anything else people like to attribute large-scale changes to, those rivers are carrying less water each year, and it seems rational that the lowlanders blame the hill-dwellers for this. General disappearance of forests of course accounts for some of this.

It’s a pity that the blame misses its target. As I’ve understood it, the rivers from Wundanyi don’t run south to Mwatate but west to somewhere else. But these things usually don’t stop people from collectively blaming something or someone outside ‘us’ (vs. ‘them’) for trouble, once they've decided so.

They get two rainy seasons here every year: one from March to July and one from October and December (now). The collective memory and experience points out that the rains have grown more irregular lately . When the rains seldom show themselves down on the plains (I’m again forced to refer to Toto’s Africa), they come as heavy downpours that cause floods instead of fertility. In between are long, dry stretches that cause suffering, tensions and conflicts over resources. Added to this is a sturdy population growth, which really doesn't help.

I've divided the study area where I will be doing interviews into three parts. It consists of two river catchments: Wundanyi (up in the hills, where the research station is located) and Mwatate (down on the plain), originally both mapped and named (for the biggest towns located in them) by people smarter than me. In addition I've divided the Mwatate catchment into two parts, since it’s a lot bigger and can be divided according to physical features (a bit hilly vs. flat, not so dry vs. very dry etc.) and because I was advised to do so by a trustworthy source. So I have three areas, differing in topography, soil, vegetation and climate.

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And there it was, one day... We we’re on a schoolyard in Mwanda, where Mwadime was checking some sensors or other scientific gadgets and I was shooting the nice view towards the west and the savanna. Mwadime mumbled something, which I didn't react to. Soon he repeated: “Oh, you’re shooting the Kilimanjaro”... Of course, I had no idea. I hadn't even noticed the vague, blue shadow so much above everything else, including some small clouds, that it didn't attract my attention simply because I couldn't conceive it as anything else than the sky. I didn't cross my mind that I was watching one of the world’s great mountains for the first time in my life.

It’s weird how seeing something far away, that’s always been there, and doesn't affect your well-being in any way can make you happy for the rest of the day, whatever may come.

You can see it too...

...right?

PS. Lion King is, and will always be the best Disney Classic ever. I still felt a tug of sick pleasure stemming deep down from childhood memories when we saw a hyena that had been transformed into roadkill on our way from Nairobi...