The linked photos include shots from both of our visits to the Rift Valley. See: http://picasaweb.google.com/dhoekema/ReturnToTheRiftValley?authkey=Gv1sRgCKr9nLTew6jp3wE&feat=directlink
While Beverly was visiting, we made a return visit to the Christian Community Services (CCS) office in Mai Mahiu that we visited first with our Calvin students on January 11. CCS is the community development arm of the Anglican Church of Kenya and a partner in many areas with the CRWRC. Our driver, Peter, got us out of Nairobi in record time, affording us time to stop on the rim of the escarpment and peer down into the dusty Rift Valley. In Mai Mahiu, we met again with Kennedy, whose work focuses on conflict resolution and the Water for Peace initiative; Catherine, who has a degree in environmental education; and James, a nurse who focuses on sanitation issues. We received more information about the environmental initiatives they were supporting and got an update on the peace and conflict resolution work that Kennedy is facilitating. We also learned that the funding for the office will end in March. Kennedy had been told that this is “due to the world-wide financial crisis.” (The main source of funds for this CCS office has been an Australian diocese.)
Before the six of us squeezed into Kennedy’s double cab 4WD pickup to visit project sites, we did a little shopping for Maasai beadwork from a woman who had dropped by the office. She told us that she worked with CCS in her village, where she is her husband’s third wife. Dressed in bright clothes and many layers of beads for her trip to town, she produced more beadwork from her bag and then took careful notes of our purchases to insure that the various women who had made the pieces were correctly paid.Our first stop was a tree nursery in a small village right next to Mt. Longonot, an ancient volcanic cone that is now a national park adjacent to Hell’s Gate, where the Calvin students hiked and saw lots of wild animals—giraffe, zebra, gazelle, and baboon. Unlike Hell’s Gate, Longonot and the hills across the valley have been totally deforested. The tree nursery project has organized a group of women, many of them widows, who have learned how to grow indigenous trees from seed and nurture the seedlings. Catherine said that the deforestation has occurred in just the last 15 years. When she was a girl, growing us in the Rift Valley, the hills were covered in forest, and she hopes that they will again be forested in her lifetime. We visited not only to admire the work they’ve been doing but also to deliver about a dozen fuel efficient “rocket” stoves, made of cast terracotta and installed with a surrounding hearth of cemented-over rocks. The women had saved up the money to buy these stoves over several months after seeing how much more efficient rocket stoves are and admiring the two-stove set-up installed at the home of one of their members.
Our second stop was at an organic farm in the Rift Valley that we had visited a month earlier. It had rained in the Rift Valley the day before our first visit but not in the month following. As we approached the farm, we were struck by what an oasis it was, the only patch of green in a dusty, barren plain. But when we went to check the progress of seedlings that had just been transplanted on our first visit, we were appalled to see the cabbage, peppers, and amaranth all being devoured by locusts. The established fields, planted in corn, cow peas, squash, and sugar cane, still looked good and were at least 6 degrees cooler than the surrounding plain, but the farmer was worried that the locusts would spread. It’s a localized infestation of huge, flightless locusts. Kennedy said the government agricultural service is trying to find a way to repel them and kill their larvae, but nothing seems to work. Unfortunately, the farm’s chickens won’t eat them.
The bone-dry conditions in f the Rift Valley were even more evident as we drove to the Maasai school in Eluai that we had first visited with the Calvin students. The faint track that we had followed as a detour because a bridge had just washed out was now a wide gash through the fields, so thick with dust that we couldn’t see rocks to avoid them. As dust devils raced past, we frantically raised windows. Whenever we stopped, the dust washed down the windows in sheets.
On our way to the school, we stopped at a small Maasai settlement where Catherine showed us how the scrubby thorn bushes ubiquitous on the floor of the Rift Valley can be made into shade trees by propping them up with sticks, inducing the bushes grew trunks, and producing trees tall enough to give shade in a short time. We also stopped at a huge water tank near the school that CCS helped bring to the valley. It holds drinking-quality water, piped from a mountain stream on the escarpment down to that dusty valley.
We also visited the family with the rocket stove that the Calvin students helped to install inside a mud-walled Maasai dwelling on our first visit. The stove was in operation and the house was full of visitors—a pregnant woman and a new mother with her two-week old baby and a toddler—who were using the stove because they were unable to gather enough firewood for conventional cooking. The interior of the dwelling--tiny, not tall enough to stand, divided into three minuscule rooms, almost completely dark, smoky and stifling hot—somehow also accommodated David, Beverly, Catherine and me. The owner told us, through Catherine as interpreter, how much she appreciated her new stove.
Our last stop was the school. A young man showed us the school garden, where they were growing beans and irrigating them with the piped water. The Maasai traditionally did not farm at all. They are pastoralists, who formerly moved often to provide their herds with good grazing. Now they are confined by lack of available land and are being forced to adapt to living in one place, keeping it clean (James has been spreading the word about rubbish pits and latrines), and diversifying their diet. The skills of all three CCs team members contribute to easing this transition. Providing water through the Water for Peace project reduces ethnic strife over water and land. Catherine’s environmental work includes encouraging farmers and pastoralists to learn from each other. It’s not only Maasai learning to grow food from farmers. When we visited the tree nursery, the farmers there showed us the patch of grass they are saving to provide for their livestock in drought, borrowing from a Maasai practice.
Nomadic cattle grazing is often regarded as an anachronism in modern Kenya. But the pastoralists many be wiser than their critics. A story in The East African, Feb 22-28, 2010, reviews a newly published book that found nomadic cattle rearing on dry grasslands in Africa to produce better quality meat and generate more cash per acre than US and Australian cattle ranches. See: http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/865642/-/pv5sthz/-/index.html
We left the Rift Valley with a strong appreciation for the work the CCS team has been doing and concern for the challenges the people of the Rift Valley face due to drought, population pressure, deforestation, and conflict.
The linked photos include shots from both of our visits to the Rift Valley. See: http://picasaweb.google.com/dhoekema/ReturnToTheRiftValley?authkey=Gv1sRgCKr9nLTew6jp3wE&feat=directlink
