The four Maasi tribeswomen are keen to talk. Sitting on the bare ground as red dust swirls around us, they tell how the drought across the East African country of Kenya has affected them.

Twenty men from the 110-strong village of Elerai, on the Kenya-Tanzania border have taken their cattle and are droving them on foot across the country in search of grass. Last the village heard, the men were near the capital of Nairobi.

“They’ve been gone two months now,” says Menteine Mparkepu, a senior woman in the village. They don’t know when the men will be back. If they stay on this dry, dusty land, the cattle will grow thinner and weaker, and even the renowned fighting skills of the Maasi won’t be able to protect them from predatory lions.

Their story is a common one across Kenya, a country in the throes of severe drought as the long rains have failed to arrive for the past three years. Experts say the country stands to lose half its cattle and goat populations during the extended drought.

The country’s main source of foreign currency is the export of agricultural goods – Kenya is the world’s biggest exporter of black tea and 75% of its population works in the agriculture sector, most as subsistence farmers.

With inflation unofficially at 30%, the price of the staple food, maize, has doubled, and the next harvest’s yields expected to be nearly a third lower than normal, according to the UN’s World Food Programme. The programme, which supports almost one in 10 Kenyans through food aid packages, estimates that 31 percent of Kenya’s total population is undernourished. It is currently appealing for money to provide emergency food assistance to nearly 4 million Kenyans hit by the drought.

Where there should be fields of tall, flourishing maize, the ground is bare save a few stunted stubs. Cattle, weakened from a lack of feed, lie dying on the roadside, unable to keep up with the herd. Wildlife workers in Tsavo East, Kenya’s largest national park, tell of the five elephants they have found in the past 14 days alone, dead from starvation, and rangers have resorted to hand feeding their wild hippopotamus populations to halt the animals’ deaths – an expensive activity with no end in sight.

However, there are still small doses of good news: such as the safari camp near Elerai village establishing a community project to train the local Maasi population in tourism. Currently, many young Maasi men are employed as security guards protecting the wildlife camps from wild animals – it’s a good job for those with little education, especially during times of drought when their cattle herds are in decline. The Satao Elerai camp aims to be completely run by the local population and is establishing a local school for the Maasi children. The nearest primary school is 1½ hours’ walk from the village.

The women make beaded jewellery to sell to passing tourists to raise money for food and hope that their children will be able to receive an education.

“Our cattle and goats are dying,” says Menteine. “We need the school so we can change our lives.”

It’s a long-term view, but Kenyans must yet survive in the short term.

http://www.sataoelerai.com
RTE World Report

Mombasssssa, Mombasa, baby. Where coconuts wash up on the shore and there are three different kinds of arrowroot on the breakfast buffet. The very name of this city conjures up white sand and tropical rhythms.

It’s only when you leave the game parks and return to Kenya’s cities that you realise how poor this country is. Sandals made from used car tyres are standard, houses are cobbled together with timber, iron sheets, mudbrick with thatch roofs and occasionally a few sturdy homes made of local stone.

Our entire trip saw us coasting along the southernmost border of Kenya and Tanzania down from Nairobi to Mombasa. Driving from the last national park, Tsavo East to Mombasa on the south coast, we started to see coconut palms and mango trees, and the air distinctly more humid with a taste of salt.

Mombasa is where much of Kenya’s Muslim population lives, influenced by the Arabian Gulf across the Indian Ocean. Traders from Oman have plied these waters with their dhows for centuries – brought in and out of the deep harbour by the trade winds that dictated their lives. Men wander around in dishdashas (the long white robes) wearing Omani-style embroidered caps and mosques, woman covering their heads with scarves and goat and camel meat are sold in the pungent open-air meat markets alongside massive hands of bananas and great tins full of colourful spices.

It’s the second biggest port in Africa after Durban, and this afternoon, Mombasa was besieged by steamy rains. Most tourists use it as a launching pad over to Zanzibar, though savvy Kenyans said the north coast of Kenya has better beaches and better prices.

Mombasa was the end of my Kenyan trip and the beginning of my journey home to Cairo, flying Mombasa-Nairobi-Khartoum-Cairo. I drank wine on the second leg and slept on the last, sprawled across three seats, only to be woken up by us hitting the tarmac! No ‘seats upright, belts on’ crap on Kenyan Air, Pride of Africa! No siree! The two large, jovial Kenyan women opposite laughed their heads as they watched me jerk bolt upright as the plane screeched to a stop: I’m pleased I could give something back to Kenya.

Poaching in one of Kenya’s premier national parks, Amboseli, is at 20-year highs, says the African Wildlife Foundation, which reported in April that 703kg of whole or partially chopped elephant tusks were confiscated from poachers in the park. That’s about 50 elephants worth of tusks. Apparently they’re reaching US$38/kg on the Chinese market. Wholesale price, of course. You can only guess at the tusks’ street value.

So when we travelled from the excellent park into its neighbour, Tsavo West, we had an armed guard of cheerful young Kenyan boys wielding Russian-made rifles to guard from unscrupulous poachers who, on a quiet day, have been known to lift a few fat Western wallets, though my guide Mwasy stresses that the last time this happened was a very long time ago. Years, in fact.

The night at Satoa Elerai camp was one of the highlights of my trip. The entire camp is just nine tents and four suites. The words ‘tents’ and ‘suites’ are so boring.

The suites are luxury cottages with thatched roofs, deep baths and enormous, romantic beds swathed in snow-white mosquito nets, and look out onto Amboseli National Park, renowned for its elephants. The tents are canvas affairs, but the massive beds look straight out onto Mt Kilimanjaro in neighbouring Tanzania, about 20km away, and the highest mountain in Africa.

In bed: There’s an elephant on the other side of my tent. I can hear it ripping apart the foliage beside my bed. It would be three meters from where I’m lying, with nothing but a pen to defend me, which, I surely feel, is NOT mightier than the sword, in this instance.

At first, I was unsure what the noise was, and went out to investigate, in nothing but my thin nightdress. I turned the light on and there he was – ears akimbo as he looked at me, and I at him. We both paused, I apologised for disturbing him, and went quietly back inside.

He is a VERY noisy eater.

He’s one of at least 10 elephants I spotted this evening from my tent’s balcony, lit a ghostly orange from the single floodlight on the waterhole. I am happy there are guards to walk me home and watch over me in the night – sort of like guardian angels…with rifles…

…he is REALLY loud. Should I ‘pppsssssst’ at him to stop, like I do with the barking dog in my Cairo neighbour’s apartment? What if he gets offended and charges?

And so he eats.

The crack of breaking branches and torn leaves.

“Enough, already!” I call out. Doesn’t he know it’s past 11pm?

Silence. For a second.

Now he’s started again.

This elephant’s going to keep me awake all night. I wonder what he’ll think when my alarm goes off at six?
____

This morning, I saw what I suspect was my night time tormenter. He is a bull elephant about 20 years old. Bobby, the long-term, Swiss-born manager of the Satoe Camp in Tsavo East natinal park, walks with me to say good morning. He speaks gently to the old man in Swahili.

“See, his hand is missing,” he says. It takes a few minutes, then I realise he’s referring to the elephant’s trunk, which ends bluntly, no curved ‘fingers’. “He lost it in a snare,” adds Bobby bluntly. A poacher’s snare? I ask. “I don’t like to talk about poachers because there’s nothing I can do to stop them.”

If the elephant survives the loss of blood and subsequent infections, he will need a friend for at least a year to help him while he learns how to live again without his hand, stepping on the grass or ripping with his tusks, instead of curling around it with his now nearly useless trunk. Then, after that year, he will most likely survive, Bobby explains.

The camp faces a small waterhole which in just one morning I spotted a herd of elephant, zebra, baboons, giraffes, waterbuk and flurries of fat, defenceless guinea fowl.

Impala trot amongst the 20 tents, babies in tow. They feel safe here and will graze the plains during the day, coming back to the security of the camp during the dark, dangerous nights. There was excitement when, before 7am, a lion was spotted by some guests, cruising the scene, but the guards are wise to his presence.

“I don’t like lions,” says Bobby, with surprising vehemence. “They are mean, stupid animals. When they kill, they begin to eat at the balls. That’s mean.”

Everything is at the waterhole even though it’s an unfashionable time to be drinking, now at lunchtime – despondent wildebeest drink morosely, zebras kick and frolic, baboons spit and argue, buffalo drink deeply and resignedly and even an impala skips between them, a scout for his bunch of bachelor boys, males who have been cast out of the herd to find their own ladies.

Tsavo West national park is stricken by drought, which is a naturally occurring phenomenon here every 10 to 15 years. But this year, it seems to be worse: perhaps because there are more tourists witnessing the effects – the decomposing bodies of starved hippos in the waterholes, the gaunt lone buffalo living from day to day in the hope lions won’t take them during the coming night, and the migration of the Maasi men, who are droving their cattle across the length and breadth of the country in search of green pastures.

On the outskirts of Nairobi, I saw a band of Maasi patiently sitting outside the Nairobi National Park waiting for their confiscated cattle to be returned to them – they had turned their herd loose in the park for its grass, and rangers had arrested the cattle and were debating the course of action.

In a Maasi village in southern Kenya, a group of women told me how 20 men from their village have been away for two months, droving their cattle. If they stay on this dry, dusty land, they will grow thinner and weaker, and even the ferocious skills of the Maasi won’t be able to protect them from lions.

Further west, in the internationally famous Masai Mara game reserve on the Kenyan-Tanzania border, we saw a Maasi cow snared in mud on a river crossing. The herd had passed through but many thin cattle gorge themselves on dry grass, then drink too deeply, their bloated bodies becoming too heavy for their thin legs, and they collapse. The herd waits for no-one. “The Maasi know they must pay a sacrifice to the greater good,” said my guide Julius. “She will either get clear and rejoin the herd, or grow weaker as she struggles and become an easy kill for the plains hunters.”

Meanwhile, in Tsavo East National Park, our camp’s staff describe how they have had five dead elephants in the past 14 days, starved of food.

The lions are fat these days, feasting on Kenya’s misfortune.