By Marion Usselman

Pam and I arrived on August 4th for a twelve day visit to Lewa. She and I had not planned anything past actually getting here, since that part seemed daunting enough and we’re both perfectly capable of happily hanging out and going with the flow. Anne, being now the veteran of many visits by friends and family and also being Anne, had a substantial list of possible activities planned. One was a trip to “the Bead Market”.

I knew about the beaded products created by the local pastoral women and had ordered a bunch of coasters and Christmas tree ornaments from Anne last fall. And since I religiously read the Ten Centuries blog, I knew about the labor disputes in the spring and had seen plenty of pictures of the traditional Masaai and Samburu women. By the time of this outing, we had also experienced a number of different Kenyan marketplaces. We had driven though the Kenyan countryside buying fruits and potatoes from roadside stands…

Buying 24 mangos

Roadside potatoes

and visited the local town of Meru to buy produce at the bustling marketplace…

Pam and Chris go shopping

and dry goods, meats, dairy, alcohol, imported pears and blankets at the modern Walmarty-style store.

Nakumat

You can get almost anything at the Nakumat

We had also purchased rugs at a women’s cooperative textile company where women were carding and spinning wool using technology that I normally associate with Sturbridge Village,

Makena Textiles

Spinners

Buying a rug

and picked up new chairs that John had ordered from the furniture maker’s store.

Furniture maker

So I had pieced all those clues together to provide myself with a mental image of what a “Bead Market” would look like. It included things like a building or tent, vendors, and business transactions—kind of like the Meru marketplace, but much smaller and involving beaded items and highly beaded women.

On Thursday morning, Pam, Chris and Doug Mattson, John and I climbed into the Toyota Land Cruiser, along with Kisio (the Masaai driver) for the trip to the Bead Market. We drove north for an hour and a half or so, through standard Kenyan countryside where small communities line the road, and the traffic on the highway is slowed down with speed bumps on either end of the community. Goats, cattle, and people are everywhere. We have seen lots of these communities, both in our drive from Nairobi, and our trip to Meru. It was all consistent with my expectations.

We then turned off onto a dirt road that led through the Samburu National Reserve. This was an interesting development, and provided an unexpected game drive and several new animal sightings, but I figured this was the scenic route to another highway that would be lined with standard Kenyan communities.

A mix of animals at Samburu National Park

When we exited the park on the other side, that highway didn’t materialize–the road became more and more tenuous, and instead of the types of buildings we had been seeing all through Kenya (which look in startling disrepair to an American, but is the norm here), we started seeing traditional Samburu Manyattas. These are domed houses constructed by covering a skeleton of branches with thatch and hides (traditionally), or with plastic, rags or sheet metal (the modern version), and surrounded by a Boma made of thorny acacia branches. Historically the houses could be moved as part of the mobile pastoral life. Most of the wood, bricks and mortar buildings were schools and clinics.

Samburu Manyattas

Village c;linic

Kisio, the driver, stopped to ask where the Bead Market was, and we started driving off-road through acacia trees and across sandy washes. There, under a grove of large trees, was a group of 60 or so Samburu women dressed in all their public gathering finery. They were sitting on the ground around a single card table. This was the bead market. Nothing in my previous experiences prepared me for it.

Bead Market under a tree

Merchants