Trip to northeast Kenya

This past week I traveled up to northeast Kenya (around Garissa and Wajir if you want to look on a map) with several colleagues to monitor a project OFDA funded to rehabilitate boreholes (really deep wells that require pumps to pull the water up) and truck water to villages with insufficient water during the drought last year.

So for several days we drove over bumpy dirt roads (I started to feel like I was getting Shaken Baby Syndrome from all the bouncing around) from one settlement to the next, asking the people living there, who are mostly nomadic but some settled, ethnic Somalis about their boreholes, water quality, and the health of children and animals.

Used as I have gotten to the very formal, long-winded West African way of doing things, our quick interviews with the Somali-Kenyans felt strange, but we did get a lot of good information.
In one settlement after the next, we were told that they need another borehole, a new generator, and often that the water coming from the existing borehole was too saline.  In one village the water was so saline that the animals are dying, because drinking the salty water just makes them thirstier, so unless the people force them away from the water, they keep on drinking until they swell up and die.

So things are tough.  If we had had more than 30 minutes to spend at any one site, I would have wanted to have a more frank discussion about priorities and needs - if they did get another borehole, it would probably just deplete the groundwater even faster, leaving them in even more of a fix in ten years or so. And if there's any increase in water availability, then people will just get more animals, and more families will move into the area, and the people will end up right back where they are now, with the bare minimum of water required to survive. And the generators are always breaking down, and getting the equipment and expertise to repair them is expensive and takes a long time, and the fuel to run them is expensive, so overall it's just not very sustainable.  The problem is, what's the alternative?

So I don't have any big answers after this trip, but I at least was able to get an idea of what life is like out there, which I think is important.  And on the fun side for me, driving around out there was like being on a safari.

We saw giraffes (which I hadn't been expecting), antelope, dik diks (which are tiny antelope the size of small dogs, and for some reason every time I saw them, I thought "Ooh, I bet those taste good!"), warthogs, baboons, and one roadkill hyena.  And to accompany the sights, our driver told us stories about his village boyhood adventures hunting giraffes with arrows (they have the tastiest meat!) and fighting pythons.

Overall, a very good trip.  Now back to the office to pay the price for all my fun with a week of mind-numbing training.

You can see more photos from my trip here.