“That was a very bad week for NRT,” Tom Lalampaa sighed as he stood in my office doorway. “I am very glad it is over. Things will be better now. We’ve used up all our bad luck for the entire year in this one week.”

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The bad week began with the cattle massacre I wrote about in “This is Real Part I.” Several days later, Gabriel Nyausi, Tom Lalampaa’s right hand man, and Nelson, a NRT driver, were returning to the office after a day of meetings. It was dark. The cautious were already off the road, but Gabriel and Nelson wanted to get home. Nelson is a member of the Kenyan Defense Reserve (KDR); Gabriel is a Samburu. They don’t scare easily. Plus, they weren’t on the most dangerous stretch of the road. That distinction belongs to the main route between Seralipi and Wamba; 50 kms of unpaved, rutted, one and a half lane dirt track that winds through a gap in the mountains. It is an ambush waiting to happen.

In their official, dark green Land Cruiser, Nelson and Gabriel rounded a corner and came upon a group of men dressed in military jackets herding goats along the road. Thinking the men were fellow members of the KDR, Nelson stopped the car and rolled down his window. “Jambo” he called. The men darted into the bush and seconds later gun shots ricocheted off the NRT vehicle. Gabriel and Nelson flung themselves forward in their seats, Nelson not quite fast enough as a bullet came through the window, cut a 4 inch gash in the top of his scalp and embedded itself in the opposite door. Thinking he was hit, Gabriel patted his body frantically searching for blood. Fortunately, nothing. A minute later, Nelson recovered his composure and his crisis driving skills. He cranked the engine, grabbed the steering wheel and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. They escaped into the night. A kilometer later the two men switched seats so Nelson could tend to his wound. Gabriel and Nelson returned to Lewa and reported the incident. NRT security decided to respond.

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April 28, 2014. Night. The 330 cattle of KP 21 shifted nervously in their two make-shift bomas. It was dark, the type of impenetrable black where you can’t see a hand held six inches from your nose. The moon wouldn’t rise until 5:58 a.m. and even then it would be a mere sliver of light, the final gasp of a waning lunar cycle. The cattle should have been in Lewa, safe behind stout metal fences. Instead they were held up in Il Ngwesi, spending the night within a ring of acacia branches. There had been a miscommunication about foot and mouth disease vaccinations and the people needed to resolve the problem (me included) couldn’t be reached. Four herders patrolled the bomas’ perimeters armed with flashlights, walking sticks and rungu, a short club with a hard knob on one end. Two others slept nearby in bedrolls next to a small fire.

NRT cattle in an acacia thorn boma.

I flew back to Kenya yesterday after a month long visit to the US. Other than my transporting a Nora virus from one grandchild in Texas to me to two grandchildren in Minnesota, it was a great trip.

Anne took a walk today so I thought that I would show you what that means.

We decided to try and get photos of a Long Tailed Widowbird and a Hoopoe on the drive to the airstrip. We were successful.

Long Tailed Widowbird

Hoopoe

I know we have fallen behind, so be prepared for me to try to catch up.

Like good Anglo-Saxon explorers, we’ve decided to stake our flag on a little piece of land and name it after ourselves. It is a modest hill just five minutes from our house. Actually, it is a hill from only one direction. From the other direction it is merely a nub of gravel littered with a few ancient lava rocks at the edge of a broad plain. For the time being, though, we’re claiming it and christening it Mlima Knapp (Knapp Hill).

Mlima Knapp

Our blog has been a bit quiet lately. It isn’t that nothing is going on. It’s just that what we are doing is harder to write about. The topics we’re discussing at the dinner table have morphed from heart-stopping wildlife sightings and bird species identification to things like:

“Given all the problems up here, what are the realistic and workable ways to improve conservation outcomes and achieve sustainable economic growth? How can we use NRT’s Livestock to Market business or tourism development as catalysts?”

“Who are the political stakeholders that need to be involved in increasing the number of teachers in the pastoralist communities and how can we keep teachers in schools when they’re being harassed by local warriors, they don’t have places to sleep and they get paid about half the time?”

We’ve moved from the wonders of the place to the nitty gritty of the work.

The hands on work of keeping track of cows when there are no computers available.

Friday night Rehema asked me if I could drive her into Isiolo on Saturday morning to attend a funeral. This was her second one in a couple of months. I got to thinking about mortality both here and at home. In the USA the life expectancy is 79 years and most of us have infrequent experience with untimely death. Here in Kenya the life expectancy of someone born in 1990 was 59 years, it dropped to 52 years by 2001 due to HIV and has risen to 63 years for a Kenyan born now. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. In the seven months that we have been here untimely death seems to be a relatively frequent occurrence.

Our community is fairly small, I would guess that 2 to 3 degrees of separation would be around 10,000 people. In the seven months we’ve been here Rehema has had two friends pass on, the first was a 40 year old woman who died of aids and Friday’s was a 24 year old man who hung himself after being diagnosed with hiv. There have been 3-4 poachers shot. The mother of one Lewa employee and the aunt of another have had fatal car accidents. And a local herder was drunk and stumbled upon an elephant. In the course of fleeing, he literally bumped into a rhino and was killed. That makes nine untimely deaths in seven months. People have funerals, cry, and get on with life. It is not as if life is considered less valuable here. The sadness and tears are real. It just seems that some early deaths are expected. They are saddened but not shocked by them. For me, as an American, it is taking some getting used to.

Fear is not an issue for Anne and me and shouldn’t be to visitors. Since we are not poachers, don’t have unprotected sex with strangers, avoid getting drunk and wandering around elephants and rhinos, and drive conservatively our actual risk, here in Kenya, is little, if any, different than it would be in the US. It’s just that early death still comes as a surprise and shock when we hear about it.

It’s been a while since my last post. I got sick (a bad piece of goat or homemade honey beer?), so I had to re-load my intestinal system. Then my computer got sick (all my office programs just quit), so I had to re-load my operating system. Both took about three days.

Anne left for the US to visit with kids and grandkids and here I am finishing up the story of Bush Adventures.

I was the best spear thrower of the three of us. It must have been the hat.

The safety talk was serious. We were using actual Maasai spears (unsharpened). Don’t stick them in anybody. Look behind you before you throw because the back end is as dangerous as the front. When you fetch them after a throw, approach them from the side so that if you trip you don’t impale yourself. When you are walking in a line, carry them either vertically or hold them with the point off to the left so that if either you or the person behind you stumbles no one gets stabbed. This is probably more than anyone wants to know but I find it fascinating that there are taught safety rules just like in a shop, the military, or anywhere people are working with potentially dangerous equipment. The tools may be different but societies work out similar ways to insure safety.

The biggest lesson about actually using a spear is to figure out the range at which you are effective, then wait until the enemy reaches that point. It doesn’t matter if you get the lion 10 meters or 2 meters away, just be sure you don’t miss.
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Last week Skylar, Quinlan (two of my step grandsons) and I went to Bush Adventures in Laparua. There we met our four Maasai guides. Born and raised nearby, Silas, Saita, and Kortol are moran (warriors) and Roslynn is Silas’ sister. We were to be trained as Maasai warriors in the daytime and talk about Maasai culture around the campfire in the evening.

Our Trainers from the front; Silas, Kortol, Saita, Roslynn