Omar puts a bottle of water in my hand as our entire group heads out to a local meeting hall – a cinder block building with a peaked tin roof – has rows of folding chairs set up.  At the front is a small stage with three large chairs – a tall one in the middle and two smaller ones on either side.  Ali asks me to take a seat in the middle chair and Kura and Judy are seated on either side.  Over fifty women plus curious onlookers fill the hall.  Ali starts the meeting and introduces some of the women leaders.

A celebration of prosperity and dignity. The orange shukas are a sign of the women's membership in a BOMA business.

What proceeds is a celebration of singing and dancing in which numerous testimonials and speeches are given.

“We want to say, kalath, (thank you), Mama Rungu, to you and Kura for what you have brought us.”

The women have composed a new song and I catch the word ‘Kura’ and ‘Mama Rungu’ in the lyrics.  Both Kura and I are given beautifully decorated rungus and I hold my rungu high above my head as we dance and sing.  When we go outside some of the women pose under a tree and I take their picture.  It is only then that I realize what all the bright orange shukas mean.  It is a sign of membership – a new identity for the women in BOMA businesses who are no longer the village beggars that gather firewood and water.  They are business owners and traders.  They are proud of their accomplishments and the orange shuka is a sign of their dignity and prosperity.

“Now we are someone, Mama Rungu.”

We make our way slowly back to Judy’s house where Omar is packing up the vehicle.  Along the way we visit one last BOMA business.  There are only two women inside the hut kiosk and they have a diverse set of goods to sell – powdered juice mixes, livestock drugs, shoes, clothes, tobacco, razor blades, lollipops and chewing gum.

Each BOMA business is comprised of three people so I ask the two women: “Where is your third business partner?”

“She had a baby last night, Mama Rungu.  She is so sorry to miss meeting you.”

“That’s ok, I will meet her next time,” I tell the women, “and her baby, of course!”

“This is a very special baby, Mama Rungu.”

“Why is that?” I ask them.

“This baby came on the day you arrived in our village. We all talked about what we would name this baby and then we decided.  We named this baby BOMA. It is a good name.”

“No one would be able to cross this land on foot, Mama Rungu,” Ali tells me, “The alkaline soil sucks the moisture from your body and burns you up.”

As we drive, the ground turns from brown to white, from rocky soil to fine sand.  Another vehicle has passed this way in the past 24 hours and we follow the tracks that lead us to a grove of trees.  It is a strange looking sight – leafless trees, no taller than 8 to 10 feet, sprout out of the sand.  There is no grass or bushes.  Just trees and sand.

“When it rains the trees will have leaves, but only for a short time,” Judy tells us.

Kura announces, “This place is called the Trees of Sand.”

Suddenly we see a creature run across the sand, headed towards the black hills of ancient volcanic rock that rim one side of the desert .  Kura guns the engine and our racing vehicle cuts the animal off before he can make it to the hill, giving us a good view.  He has dark circles around his eyes, a striped tail and a low, badger-like body.  Later we find out that it was an unusual daylight sighting of a civet cat.

To our right we see rows of large black stones.

“This was a place from a long time ago,” Ali tells us. “There was a great battle between the Gabbra and the Rendille and there were so many Gabbra killed that the Rendille elders told the warriors to place large black stones in every place where there was a dead Gabbra warrior.”  Laid out like a runway, we saw hundreds of stones.

“This happened a long time ago, Mama Rungu, but the stones are still here.”

Kura is driving fast and the morning wind coming through the open windows feels great. Finally the desert is ahead of us – a white land of nothingness with a horizon that is a straight flat line.

“Do you see the mirage up ahead, Mama Rungu?” Kura asks me.  After crossing the Falam and other desert lands of northern Kenya, I thought I had the ability to discern mirage from reality.

“Not so!” says Kura, “This time it is not a mirage.  It is actually a lake, an alkaline lake, here on the edge of the desert.  Camels love this water and our warriors risk their lives to bring their camels out here.”

We get out and wander to the edge of the lake.   Crumbling crystals of salt cling to its rim and flocks of plovers, geese and ducks honk and squawk.  We poke at the crusts of salt and throw stones at the feathers drifting in the putrid green water.  Paleontologists have found the fossilized remnants of fish and snail shells in the desert – evidence that a large lake once existed here.  But today it is a shallow pond – amazing given that it has not rained here in over a year.

Kura in the middle of the Chalbi Desert

It is too hot to linger.  We climb back into the vehicle and drive out into nothingness.  Flat, hot nothingness for as far as you can see.  This is a first for Ali and Judy.  We stop a few more times and take lots of pictures before the sun drives us back into the vehicle for the journey back to Kargi.

We need to get back – the women in town have planned a special event for us.  We don’t want to be late.

We arrived in the middle of the day.   I asked Omar to bring me a basin of water into which I dipped my thin scarf.  After loosely squeezing it, the blood warm water dripped back into the basin which Omar set on the ground. I lay down on the mattress and draped the wet scarf over me. The fabric cooled my body and face and served as a barrier, keeping the hundreds of flies that circled overhead from reaching my mouth and nose.  Semeji put a rock against the door so that no one would disturb me.  Nearby I could hear Kura’s voice saying to a gathering crowd, “Yes, Mama Rungu,” and then the voices would respond “Ooohh Mama Rungu,” and I knew there were people sitting on the ground outside of my hut.  I tried to sleep in order to block out the heat and the noise and the smells.

After a few hours, I moved the rock and came out into the bright light. Dozens of women were seated on the ground.  As news of my emergence spread, more people gathered in the shade of Judy’s house.  Judy offered me a chair and I sat with the women, sipping a hot cup of tea with sugar and goat milk.

“Ready, Mama Rungu?”

“Ready, Kura.”

A customer buys some traditional medicine from a BOMA business in Kargi

Before we left, I dipped my scarf again into the basin of water and wrapped it around my neck.  My hat was pulled as far down as it could to protect my face from the still-blazing sun.  We walked into the center of the village where there were numerous BOMA businesses and kiosks.  There are 16 large Rendille clans in the Kargi region and each of the businesses sell to their own clans.  What was unique about the Kargi businesses was that some of the kiosks, constructed of branches and reeds around the base of a small tree, are double businesses, with a few sticks to separate one business from another.  I am told the women enjoy the camaraderie of shared businesses and that this arrangement has actually helped bring in more customers.  Sort of the whole Burger King across from McDonalds thing.

With each woman I visit, I gain better insights into what it is like to be the poorest of the poor in a livestock and food aid dependent community.

“We were blind, Mama Rungu.  We did not know what to do.  We did our chores and then went behind the house to sleep. Now with this business, we are now more active than the men.”

“Before we used to beg so much.  In our culture if you bring a rope to someone’s house they have to give you a camel.  But not anymore.  Now, everyone is poor because so many of the livestock have died.”

Some of the women I talked with referred to the Hunger Safety Net Programme (the distribution of cash instead of food) as “the computer.”

“With BOMA we were told to use the money to help ourselves, not to eat.  The computer goes straight to your stomach but this business is always with us.”

“When we are poor we must put our livestock with other people and we must sacrifice a child who will stay with those people.  The children must watch the livestock and after one year they are given a camel.”

“My first born daughter had to drop out of school and get married because we did not have the money for her school fees.  If I had this business then I would not have let her get married. “

Marsogoso Galnagale of the Borehole Business Group was in a double business kiosk and one of the other business group members was her mother.  I asked Marsogoso if she had ever begged for credit or food from community members.  “Of course, Mama Rungu, I have children.  When all the livestock died we begged from those that still had livestock.  But if you are a beggar, you do not get the fatty part of the camel.”

“What about your mother, did she beg?”

“Yes, she would go and ask for credit or food and we would often go to bed hungry.  Begging is part of life.  We call it ‘Daheateyan’ – begging is the first born.  It is part of life.”

“Will your children beg, Marsogoso?”

“No Mama Rungu, with this business I can get food and I can take my children to the clinic.  I can give them an education and they will learn from me how to do business.  My son is twelve years old and he is a herder.  I hope that someday he will go to school so that when the livestock die he will not have to beg.”

I am perplexed by the high number of children that are not in school.  Ali Turaga, the other BOMA Mentor for Kargi tells me, “a family will always send their smartest children to mind the livestock.  School is for the child that is not too smart.”

“He is right, Mama Rungu,” Marsogoso tells me, “We did not know the importance of education but now we do.  I want my last born to reach the highest level.  It is the educated ones that come back and help us.  Now I must make this happen.”

Aid organizations like to distribute food in road accessible locations with a certain population density.  As one official of a large organization based in Nairobi told me, “our foreign government donors don’t like us to do too much in northern Kenya.  There is not enough population density so our cost per person to distribute food aid or provide development programs is too high.”

That is why we are seeing so many traditional pastoralists settle in villages like Kargi.  As many residents have told me, “if we move away, then we will not receive food aid when there are droughts.  We have to stay here.”

So now Kargi has a population of about 5500 people and there are many aid organizations in the village.   If you Google Kargi, you will come up with all kinds of videos and press releases on their life-saving work. Recently, the aid organization, CARE, piloted a progressive food aid program called the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP).  Instead of providing relief food, CARE gives people money so that they can buy the food they need to survive.

In casual conversations with village leaders, it becomes obvious to visitors like me that over 50% of the population of Kargi receives some form of food aid – either monthly distributions of maize, and sometimes beans and oil, and/or HSNP funds.

It is in places like this that you get a good picture of what food aid looks like.  Almost every stick hut is covered with relief food sacks or cans emblazoned with “US AID” or “Gift from the American People.”  The maize, or cow corn, is the main staple of food aid.  Purchased from large industrial farms in the Midwest by US taxpayers., it is put on ships, who are also paid by American taxpayers.  Food aid is big business and it is a source of significant revenue for farmers and shipping companies, hence their lobbying presence in Washington, DC.  They need famine.

The World Food Programme oversees much of the distribution of food aid when it arrives in the port of Mombasa, Kenya, channeling it through other aid organizations like Red Cross and Care. Some distribute the food to places like Kargi.  Others, in a controversial procedure, sell the food on the open market providing a source of revenue that helps pay for salaries, offices and poverty reduction programs. But this practice also undermines African food markets and can be a devastating blow to small African farmers.  In a brave stand, CARE was one of the first to disavow this practice.

This season, the food aid is different.  Much of the corn is very hard.  People have asked me if the American farmers were somehow drying the corn with heat.  When the corn is this hard, it must be cooked for 7 to 8 hours over an open fire, using up precious resources like firewood and water.  Even then, the resulting porridge is difficult to digest, especially for the elderly and young children.

And so I found myself sitting in the hut of Ndebe Arbele, a member of one of the BOMA businesses in the village of Falam.  With a seed capital grant of $150 provided by BOMA, her business group, May Yeel, has been able to buy food, beads, washing powder, and other small essentials in Marsabit which they then sell in their village to residents and travelers.  Ndebe and her other partners attended BOMA business skills training programs and soon they will start on a series of training programs on savings.  After just two short months they were able to distribute profits to their members and according to their record book, they now have savings and cash on hand of 5300 shillings.

Ndebe's son who was bitten by a rabid dog.

As Kura translated, Ndebe told me about her son who was bitten by a rabid dog.  The medical treatment was 4000 shillings for four injections.  She told me, “If it was not for this business I would not have been able to pay for the medical treatment for my son.  Many children here die from rabies but not my son.”

I am very aware that when I visit with our BOMA businesses that many times I am told what I want to hear.  On this occasion, I decided to push back.

“But didn’t you also receive money from HSNP?  I am looking at your group’s record book and I don’t see how the 4000 shillings came from the BOMA business,” I said to her.

Ndebe looked down.  “Yes, you are right.  I also took my HSNP money to pay for the shots.”

She looked up at me with tears in her eyes.  “Please,” she said to me, “please don’t take this business away from me.  All my life I have been a beggar.  I used to be idle waiting for food relief to feed my children.  Now I am a trader.  Now I work every day.  From others we get relief but it always ends.  This business stays with us and now I am someone.  Please, please don’t take this away from me.”

I suddenly realized that it is in places like this that we stake our claim.  We can provide grants and training so that women like Ndebe can earn an income that will help her care for her seven children. But the human spirit craves dignity and respect more than it seeks wealth, and that is what we had given Ndebe.  It was enough.

“I could never take this business from you, Ndebe.  It is yours forever.  Thank you for telling me why this business is important to you.  I will always come and visit you when I am here and I want you always to tell me what you feel in your heart.”

“Kalath, Mama Rungu.”  Thank you.

Our destination was the village of Kargi.  Enroute we would drop off Caro at her home in Olturot and then we would spend two nights in Kargi at Judy’s home.  I had been looking forward to visiting Kargi as we now have 40 businesses in and around the village.  Later in the month, we would launch 20 more.  There was tremendous enthusiasm for our work in Kargi, and we had worked hard to establish ourselves in this village region, keeping in mind that we also had to keep our staff safe in an area that sees frequent ethnic conflicts over livestock.  What was heartening was that we also had overwhelming support for our work by the leadership of the village.  The chief had even told Kura “…these BOMA people, they look shiny.”  Clean, healthy, shiny.  Shiny is good.

Everyone started to shed layers as we drove across the flats.  It was now over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Rounding a stand of short scrub trees we finally saw the Falam ahead of us – a strange bowl of soft sand with the dead skeletons of ancient trees poking out from the surface.  In another climate, it would be a bowl of snow where the wind blows the soft material across the surface – filling in hidden crevasses and drops. Anyone trying to traverse this stretch has to know the route.  Despite its ominous reputation, I wanted to get out and walk.  I wanted to photograph Gumps as Kura drove across the Falam.

Omar and I jumped out and immediately sank down above our ankles in warm powder.  It was tolerable for a few seconds before you felt the need to move away from the heat, only to sink down again in another ring of powder.  We kicked the sand into the air and it drifted off in little fluffs.  A dust devil came toward us but then veered away as if intimidated by the unearthly appearance of the Falam.

Kura pointed us in the direction we should walk and Omar and I started out. The heat poured down on us like white hot lead.  I tried to take a few pictures but you could not stand still for very long before the sand would start to burn.  Finally, we reached one corner of the angulated circle of this strange land.  I turned and signaled to Kura, camera ready.

Gumps crossing the Falam

The vehicle roared in low gear and was immediately swallowed by the dust. Omar and I were on the windward side of Gumps and we were able to capture glimpses of the vehicle as the wind blew the powdered sand high into the air.  Gumps bounced across the surface, forward momentum maintained.   Omar and I were yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”  It was awesome.

A halo of dust settled on everything around us as the vehicle stopped.  Kura had left the window open and his face and clothes were now coated with a light brown dust that stood in contrast to his dark skin.   We were all coughing and sputtering and cheering. “Thank God we made it across before the rains come, Mama Rungu.  The rain turns the Falam to cement and we would never be able to cross,” Kura told me.

“I know, Kura, you once called me on the satellite phone when you were stuck in this place.  And this is where you also saw the cheetahs that time, right?”

“Yes, this is it.  We had broken down, and we were driving at night.  You were driving to Loiyangalani in the other vehicle and we were late meeting you but I still woke you up at 3 am to tell you we had seen the cheetahs!”

“That’s a great memory, Kura.”  We both were grinning.

We got back in the vehicle and the road returned to hard pack sand.  The light breeze blew the powdered dust out of our hair and clothes.  Just before Kargi we stopped in the appropriately named Rendille village of Falam.  Kura wanted me to meet one of the BOMA businesses in the village  I didn’t know it then, but I was about to meet a woman who would redefine the way we evaluate our work.  And she would bring me to tears.

Blasting down the Rift Valley are wind currents propelled by hot dry air masses from the north that create an almost constant growl of wind. These were the winds that now pounded the village of Gatab, perched on the edge of one of the sheer mountain cliffs of Mt. Kulal. I was glad we were staying in a solid cement house– the home of a doctor who had left the area but allowed visitors, approved by the missionaries, to use the home during his absence. It was a clean, sparsely furnished house with three bedrooms and the ultimate luxury of a flush toilet.  As night descended on the village, we settled in.  Sheets were put on beds and Omar cooked us a dinner of rice, cabbage and some of the fresh spinach from South Horr.  While we ate, Kura, Judy and Ali told me the ancient story of Harra, the Rendille giant who was eventually killed by the red hot knife of his own people, driven straight into his heart.

I tried to sleep, but the thorn branches of a bougainvillea bush, brilliant with pink blossoms during the day, now clawed at the tin roof of the building, desperately trying to hang on as the wind blew and blew.  The missionary’s dogs barked in desperate pleas for calm which eventually came with the dawn, as the winds quieted down and the mists descended from the forest, blanketing the village in an eerie white fog.

No one was in a hurry to leave.  We slowly drank our sweet tea and packed the vehicle.  Damaris and her husband hosted us in their new home for a breakfast of njera and more tea.  Hosea, the other Mentor from Gatab, also joined us.  I was disappointed that I could not visit with more of our businesses in the village yesterday, as many of them were closed because of the demonstration.  I did get a chance to visit with Alice Learamo of the Baraka business group and I was impressed with the diversity of products that her group was selling – metal cow bells and tire sandals from the Maasai markets of Narok, padlocks and inexpensive cell phones.  The business had propelled Alice to take adult literacy classes so that she could maintain the group’s financial records.  The mother of five children, Alice told me, “most of my life I have had nothing.  Now I have a little something for myself and my children.”

“How has the drought affected you?” I asked her.  “When others were suffering we were comfortable,” she told me.

The path that we drove through the Mount Kulal Forest

I was looking forward to our trek today because we would be driving through the verdant Mt. Kulal forest, part of the reason that Mt. Kulal has been deemed a UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Reserve.   Surrounded by deserts, this unique forest traps moisture, contributing to the humidity and cool evening temperatures on the mountain.  Dozens of forest springs provide water and the cleared patches of land, clinging to unstable volcanic soil, at times becomes green grazing lands for goats and cows.

Kura carefully steered Gumps down a forest path.  Semeji gripped my shoulder from the back seat, excited and terrified as we rocked and rolled over boulders and around giant trunks of trees.  Moss hung from branches and the vines of strangler figs descended from the canopy, choking the life out of the trees that had originally hosted them.  Occasionally we would come upon people herding their livestock through the forest, including visitors from the drought-devastated villages of the arid lands below.

“Who is in charge of protecting the forest?” I asked Hosea.  “Oh, we have a forest ranger, who is supposed to keep people from cutting down trees and foraging their livestock in the forest, but he lives in the village of Loiyangalani.” Loiyangalani was dozens of kilometers away.

At the base of one of the giant trees of the Mt.. Kulal forest - Omar, Hosea, Carol, Ali Turaga, Kura, Semeji and Judy

We stopped a few times to get out and walk.  I couldn’t believe the size of the trees and we took a group picture at the base of one of the most impressive specimens.  Eventually, we emerged from the forest and joined another path that took us to the village of Arapal, home to a smaller Samburu community.  We visited with a few of our businesses in the village.  Before I got back in the vehicle, I took a last deep breath of the cool mountain air.  Ahead of us was the Falam, a notorious desert that we would have to cross in order to reach the village of Kargi.

The Gumpsmobile was packed.  Besides all of our supplies, including food, water, vehicle parts and diesel on the roof, we had 12 passengers: on the two back bench seats, squished between luggage and tires, rode the four men: Semeji, Omar, Ali Turuga from Kargi and Hosea from Gatab.  In the second row rode the women and babies: Judy and baby Brian, Carol from Olturot, Damaris and baby Anon and Teresa from Loiyangalani, the headmistress of one of the Gatab primary schools. Kura and I, the laptop backpacks and some food supplies rode in the front.  We also had to pack up some of the Mentor’s purchases from the relative lush valley of South Horr: young mango trees, grain sacks of lentils, spinach and vegetables and mysterious bags of medicinal herbs and seeds.

The dirt and sand road out of South Horr is initially the same route to Loiyangalani.  Kura had decided that we would not make the trek to Loiy and Lake Turkana this time as we wanted to see new villages and he was concerned about the security of the Loiy road.  The livestock from the north had been moved to the nearby Baragoi region in a desperate attempt to save them and so the potential presence of armed gangs of cattle rustlers could not be dismissed.   At the “junction”, the critical point where Semeji “mans up” by riding in the front seat with the AK47 safety off, we turned right to Mt. Kulal.

Stopping for a vehicle check on the road up Mt. Kulal.

The wind cooled the rocky land where two years ago I had recorded our highest temperatures – 117 degrees Fahrenheit.  This time, the air had hints of moisture – the wind was bringing rain.  The mountain was shrouded in clouds as we made our way up the road that is cut into the solid red clay and boulders of the mountain.  On the other side of the road is an unmarked edge that drops off steeply, at times into fields of sharp volcanic rocks. Abrupt curves and vehicle-swallowing potholes added to the excitement.  But Gatab is always worth the trip.  After rounding a hairpin turn you come upon the village – a hanging Shangri-la perched on the edge of one of Mt. Kulal’s many canyons.

We came upon an unusual scene. Gatab is a community of 560 households and today hundreds of residents were sitting or standing in the fields below the main part of the village.  Most were groups of men with their walking sticks and shukas over their shoulders.  There were also huddled groups of women with babies and older women sitting on the ground.  It was a scene of quiet protest against one of the missionaries that lives with his family behind a tall chain link fence.  I was only a casual observer and the circumstances were, I am sure, complicated.  But it is hard not to notice, amidst the simple poverty of this village, the relative wealth of a family who I am told do not interact socially with the village – multiple ATV and lorry vehicles, a backhoe, a wind tower, a satellite dish and a trampoline for children that do not attend the local school.  All of this infrastructure was in support of a clinic and Haven Home – a boarding school for nomadic children and orphans.

After nine-plus years of living in their midst, the community was protesting the actions of one of the preachers. A number of years ago a local woman had received a divorce after years of abuse by her husband.  She was employed by the missionaries and had finally decided that she wanted to have a baby but she would do it without a husband. She was fired.  According to a number of village leaders that I spoke with, this was the last straw.

The police and local commissioner were called and through the night a security patrol was provided to protect the missionary family compound.  It was unclear how much of a threat this siege scene was.  But clearly the community felt strongly that they wanted the missionary and his family out.  They wanted them to leave.  “We’ve had enough,” was what I was told over and over.  I tried to find out more and later that evening I did a search on the web (yes, you can get slow internet through a mobile phone modem) where I found this description of Haven Home: “Haven Home provides a Christian environment for these young people from many of the immoral and destructive tribal practices.”

It was going to be an interesting night.

I then spent a lot of time looking at the role of community health care workers (CHCW) in Africa.  I wanted to know what we could learn from the training and empowerment of CHCW workers and how could we apply lessons learned to our team of BOMA Village Mentors. In our last impact assessment we had a 4% failure rate of the first 100 businesses.  So I asked the BOMA team, “What if the businesses were patients?  Would we tolerate a 4% failure rate?  We have participants that live on the edge of survival.  We have a program that helps them feed their families, educate their children and keep them healthy.  Are we willing to accept that 4% or more of the participants will fail?  What are the consequences of that failure?”

This conversation led to a fascinating discovery.   Once we started focusing on our failures, we became more imaginative, more creative.  And then we knew what we needed to do.  Every organization, for profit or not, likes to focus on their successes.  If you are a non-profit, you especially want to tout your successes as this enables you to secure more donations.  But in the process of focusing on our failures, we also began to focus on where we could innovate in order to achieve success.  And that came down to the training and support of our local Mentors. They are the heart of our program and we realized that we need to give them every resource possible so that they can fortify the success of 100% of our businesses.   We set a goal for the following year: a 0% failure rate.

Today was our final day of Mentor University and I had been simply an observer.  This was their program and they did not seek an affirmation from me.  At Kura’s invitation I shared some final remarks and the BOMA family beamed back to me with smiles of hope and vitality as I shared with them the concept of 0% failure. It was a goal – a lofty goal – but I could sense the confidence in the room.  Our Mentors come from communities that have been overwhelmed by aid organizations that keep them on life support.  Our program represented an opportunity to bring out the strength and resilience that resides in all of us.  I could not have been prouder to be associated with this outstanding group of individuals.

A pick-up truck of happy BOMA Mentors after the 3 day Mentor University training program

Lunch was served and then two vehicles were loaded up with Mentors.  Maina would drive a group of Mentors along with Emma and Sarah in the Defender – heading to the main road and dropping people at BOMA villages along the way.  Kura had also arranged for a pick-up truck to return another group of Mentors on the way to Marsabit.   Each vehicle was packed with enthusiastic travelers.   Tomorrow Kura, Semeji, Omar and I would leave with the remaining mentors on a week long journey to visit BOMA villages and businesses.  And that’s when the adventure really begins.

Maina, BOMA's Driver and Mechanic and baby Brian

When the babies are awake they are passed from person to person. They are hugged, cuddled and kissed by men and women alike.  When the baby becomes too much of a distraction we pass Brian and Anon out to our appointed BOMA nannies – Maina, the mechanic and driver, and Semeji, our AK47-toting security guard.  They walk with the babies, rock them and sing them songs.

My personal observation of the northern Kenyan culture is that love and charitable acts are practiced in the extreme.  Members of a family are expected to care for their extended family as well as their neighbors.   Unlike western culture, where traditionally a man is expected to care for his wife and children, in this culture a man has the significant burden of caring for not only his immediate family but also for his parents, and siblings and his wife’s parents and siblings. Visitors can show up at your home and you are expected to provide a place to sleep and food to eat.

Seneji, BOMA's Security Man, and Anon

Within families, it is sometimes expected that a man care for at least one of his wife’s siblings which may include sponsoring them to the highest level of education.  In theory, this encourages development in both families but this responsibility can become a significant burden for men.

So today in the training session we are our own extended family and the babies in our midst are lovingly cared for.  Semeji’s joyful manner attracts babies and children of all ages and it is especially poignant to see him surrounded by children, when he still has none of his own.  I hope he will be soon blessed with a baby that will join this extended family.

As light filtered through the cracks of my wooden windows, I heard the sounds of a village — chickens and goats and the gentle sound of soft voices waking to the day. A tropical bulbul, go-away birds and the honking of a hornbill joined the chorus. And then it came — the sound that has started almost every day that I have ever spent in Africa — the whisk, whisk of a palm-branch broom.

The BOMA Village Mentor training session started immediately after a breakfast of mandazi and chai. Today we would focus on the new micro-savings program that Sarah has developed. After a six-month pilot and subsequent evaluation in Loiyangalani and Korr, we were officially launching the program to the rest of the region. The pilot had demonstrated that a micro-savings plan that sets aside regular committed funds in a safe location can provide insurance against the regular shocks that are typical for people who live in poverty. It can also become a source of savings-led credit that will help the business group members grow their businesses. Sarah did a great job of presenting a rather complicated program. In practice, we knew it would be much easier once they started implementing the program, but I was glad that our BOMA training manuals had everything explicitly spelled out for the Village Mentors.

Mid-afternoon I went back to my hut to wait out the worst heat of the day. When I returned, the training session had finished. “Where is everybody?” I asked Omar.

“They are in town, Mama Rungu. This is a big town for many people — they are shopping and some are even getting a haircut.”

Bosco tells a story

Tonight would be our last night together, so I paid for a case of Tusker beer and sodas.  As it grew dark, everyone straggled back to camp and gathered in a circle of chairs outside my hut. Kura offered t-shirts to anyone who would tell a story and enthusiastic performers entertained us with tales of hyenas, zebras and the elephant and the hare. Song leaders led us in rounds of music and spirits were high by the time dinner was served — heaping bowls of rice, cabbage and goat meat.

The dust from dancing feet and the sound of chanting voices rose into the dark night sky

When the food was finished, and before the staff could clear the plates, the dancing began. It started with sonar tenor chants and simple songs. The staff quickly abandoned the huge serving bowls and dishes on the porch of my hut and joined in the singing and dancing. Soon other guests at the club and then people from town joined the celebration. Arms around waists, hands clasped and feet pounding in a circle of bodies, the ethnic mix of Samburu, Rendille, Ariaal and Turkana voices joined together in a shared chant — i-lee-um, il-ee-um, il-ee-um, il-ee-um. Teresa and Semeji’s voices pierced the chanting with whoops and wails and lilting songs, connecting the voices to stories of love and longing and the battles of brave warriors. Two of our young mothers handed me their babies and I held them close as the dancers pounded their feet and sang the songs of the people from the north. The dust and voices rose into the black night sky.

Kura collapsed in a chair next to me. “Mama Rungu, this is it! We are an army. An army of peace and hope. We are…the BOMA Army!”

Amen, Kura, amen.