Chapter Two: Kenya 


The NFD

I am sitting on Dilly’s veranda, at 8,000’ altitude, on the slopes of 17,057’ high Mount Kenya, overlooking what used to be called the “Northern Frontier District” which reaches the border of Ethiopia. Dilly’s place is virtually part of Lewa Downs Nature Conservancy, a unique haven for a great variety of wildlife.

We are enjoying a gab-fest raking over shared family memories going back almost 100 years to when Shaffers and Andersens first came to Kenya. A rich heritage. I have been stunned at times to observe the exponential growth of “development” in possible “values development” in the form of schools, health services and participatory political development. 

I earnestly hope that the latter will keep pace. But, there are as many reasons for pessimism as for optimism. A salient issue is the success of “Mama S” (Sami Saluhu Hassan) the new president of Tanzania. If in her popularity she can overcome the reactionary old-guard she may induce some “wind of change.” My intuition is that Julius Nyerere would be her cheer leader. 

In the coming days we will be rendezvousing with old col-leagues from organizations we were connected to in Kenya: AMREF (Flying Doctors); AIM (Africa Inland Mission); Nairobi University Medical School; Nairobi Baptist Church; MAP (Medical Assistance Program); RVA (Rift Valley Academy).

Back in Tanzania we will be re-visiting Monduli Hospital, KCMC (Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center), Marangu Hotel, and FAME (Foundation for African Medicine and Education) hospital.

Thanks to the combination of a Range Rover, Steve’s very skillful driving, and much highway modernization, we travel in great comfort. But I still remember fondly the days of a Model T traversing primitive tacks. Low horsepower and tiny tires were the norm.

Our route around Kenya

The NFD, as seen from Andersen's porch

Sarara Camp

From Dilly’s home on Mount Kenya, we drove down and across the NFD to Sarara Camp. This is a unique facility nestled naturally on the eastern slope of a range of hills. The original ownership goes far back in Kenya’s colonial past. But that is now blended with meaningful Samburu tribal involvement in the business.

We were happily welcomed by the Samburu maitre d’ and staff. It was a joy to me and surprise to them that we were chatting in the Maa tongue (shared language with Samburu).

Each bedded facility is so skillfully blended with nature that one feels like Adam and Eve in their pre-clothing mode. One showers seemingly “in the open.”

The Camp overlooks a water hole which attracts a 24/7 parade of a great variety of wildlife. Beyond the water hole stretches the NFD, a seeming thorny wilderness which in fact teems with wildlife.



The Dream Continues

This evening’s ritual sundowner site was around a fire in a dry riverbed. En route there we hung around with a family of giraffe and then spotted three or four gerenuk. These antelope have long necks, as though their evolution to giraffe had been stopped short.
At the sundowner, the alcohol evoked considerable yarn-spinning.


En route back to camp one of the escorts sat on the roof of the Land Rover wielding a powerful spotlight. Thus we saw a caracal and then a genet cat. But the piece-de-resistance was a leopard whom we watched for some time.

Back at camp, our dinner table overlooked (50 feet) a family of elephant drinking and lounging at the water hole.
The dream continues!

Singing Wells

In the seemingly barren “NFD” (Northern Frontier District) the only source of water for most of the year is from wells dug deep in sandy riverbeds. The wells have to be deep enough to reach an “aqui-fer” strata. That may be fifty feet (6 bailers) down.

Each bailer perched on a log embedded in the shaft wall. The water is passed upward in leather buckets, bailer to bailer. It is very hard work. But the tediousness is offset by the bailers’ sing-ing/chanting odes to the stock they are watering. Hence the title “Singing Wells.”

It is a moving combination of survival strategy and deep feel-ings of emotional attachment.

The setting evokes biblical scenes. At times I “saw” Abraham waiting his turn.

 
Reteti Elephant Sanctuary

Near Sarara Camp, and importantly related to it, is Reteti Ele-phant Sanctuary.

Reteti is a very unique venture in elephant conservation.

Orphan elephant babies are brought to a shelter for food and the companionship of other elephant orphans. They are not penned in, but the lure of regular milk brings them in twice or thrice a day. At night they voluntarily crowd together in a carnivore-proof enclosure. By day, as they grow older they roam farther and farther from the base.

Also as they grow older they begin to form up as “family,” drawn together by natural elephant instinct. The expectation is that this hybrid family will, still as a family, launch out into the bush on its own and eventually replicate.

There is some statistical support for the hope that the elephant population is stabilizing in the NFD. Retei is bold, novel and crucial.

The periodic feeding is as hilarious to behold as is the baby ele-phant scene in Arusha in the film “Hatari.”

“Reteti” derives from the root Maa word for helpfulness. When we were kids at Lasit we once surreptitiously watched the Maasai convened around a sacred Oreteti tree ceremonially imploring god for help in childbearing.


www.reteti.org



Slice of Kenya

Today we traversed what might be thought of as a slice through a multi-layered cake. We left the semi-desert of the “NFD,” climbed to the semi-alpine shoulder of Mount Kenya, dropped down onto the floor of the “Great Rift Valley” and then ascended the western scarp of the Rift to Njoro. Here we are reveling in the past.

We are B&B guests in the cottage of Beryl Markham, author of “West with the Night.”

The current owner is Andrew Nightingale, a third or fourth generation Kenya “settler” and a cousin of friend Dan Etherington. So, we've had a great “natter” with him. Tomorrow we will take a walk to check out the horses (Beryl Markham had been a very successful trainer of racehorses) and Kenana Knitters.

Tomorrow to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria.
 


Female Writers from Kenya

En route from Samburuland to Kisumu on Lake Victoria we night-stopped at Njoro near Nakuru. We stayed in the house of Beryl Markham, author of West with the Night.

This recounted her pioneering solo flying East-to-West across the Atlantic. Markham enlarged her personal legend by successes in producing race-winning horses.

Another female Kenya-based writer was Karen Blixen author of Out of Africa. I myself prefer Markham's writing to Blixen's.
Wangare Mathai was a Kenyan trained biologist whose passion-ate public activism for conservation earned her a Nobel Prize, the first ever for an African woman. Her books on the subject earned her a wide readership.

Reunion at Saradidi

At AMREF I coordinated the Community Health Worker Sup-port Team. An important member of that team was Dan Kaseje MD. His family had donated part of their land as a site for the training of Community-Based Health Workers in the skills of Community-Based Health Care. The place was called Saradidi.

At Saradidi the team worked out what we felt were locally appropriate elements of what WHO was calling “Primary Health Care.” We chose to call our curriculum “Community-Based Health Care” or CBHC.

Dan, in cooperation with church, civic and government authorities had mobilized a team of about a dozen trainees (all women). Penina Ocholla (my deputy) being also a Luo was enormously helpful in contextualizing the ideas. We worked out content, schedule and, most importantly, pedagogy (teaching method). We put a lot of emphasis upon some principles elucidated by Paulo Freire. My personal distillation of his philosophy came out as “LePSA” for Learn-er-centered, Problem-posing, Self-discovering and Action-taking.

Saradidi became the main birthplace of CBHC. The team and the CHW ladies established a spirit of adventure as we discussed, argued, sang and even danced out the “community-based” elements of health care. Now we came back together, much older, but with no loss of enthusiasm for the possibilities of CBHC. Though all grannies, they were full of pep in their reminiscences. One brought a full set of the visual aids we had helped them make for themselves.

We were treated to a boat excursion on Lake Victoria. The nice setting was matched with Luo (tribe) music and dancing. The owner of the excursion boat was a retired physician who remembered my teaching in med. school. The boat ride was followed by a shoreline dinner of local Tilapia fish.


Great Lakes University at Kisumu (GLUK)

I have written about Saradidi (community based health care training) and its successor (after my time) “TICH.”

TICH was in turn replaced by an initiative to upgrade TICH to something at a higher academic level. This was “Great Lakes University” (“GLU”). The aim of GLU was to provide community based health care (CBHC) training at the BSc level. The plot of land was secured, funding found, facility building started, students recruited, and a teaching program begun.

But progress of GLU has been seriously hampered by problems with control of funds. I spoke to an assembly of students and participated in a tree planting. But I fear that there remain many uncertain-ties about GLU’s evolution.

Currently the title “GLU” is being amended to “GLUK.” This incorporates the place Kisumu in the title and plays upon the German word for “luck.”


AMREF Reception

AMREF (African Medical & Research Foundation, also known as Flying Doctors, that I worked for from 1963-1965 and again from 1978-1986) put on a session of remembrance of my years with the organization. The event was at AMIU (Amref International Universi-ty, founded in 2017) in Nairobi. The program was very loaded, with speakers representing every viewpoint. Some were very personal and reflected significant actual experiences and practical perspectives. Some were rather rhetoric-rich. As usual there were gifts and pix.

Three or four were actual colleagues or contemporaries of those days. Daniel was the blind telephone switchboard operator. Joyce was a nurse with whom Betty and I had camped under a baobab tree in South Sudan. She had spent many years nursing in the DC area. Douglas Lackey was an American whose trajectory onto NBA fame was stopped by a knee injury. Miriam Were has been a fellow tutor at the University of Nairobi Medical School and later was Chairman of the Board of AMREF.

I am slowly eliciting how the AMIU BSc degree in Community Health Practice relates, in practice, to the CBHC (Community Based Health Care) program we developed.

https://amref.org


Visiting Nairobi Baptist Church

This morning we attended Nairobi Baptist Church, where we had attended for many years. The building had become relatively gargantuan. The worship mode was hundreds of decibels louder than in our day. Two of the pastors were offspring of dear friends. I greatly appreciated the “applied theology” as they addressed the forthcoming national election from the perspective of Christian responsibility. It was a gratifying morning.

The trip continues to resemble a Mozart medley with the added syncopation of driving on many bumpy dirt roads.


Lunch at the Carnivore with Naomi Konditi

After NBC we went to the Carnivore, an old Nairobi hang-out. Though wild game hunting was banned in Kenya decades ago the Carnivore has legal access to supplies of an intriguing variety of both wild and domestic “carne.”

We were guests at the Carnivore of Naomi Konditi. The Shaffer/ Konditi family affinity in Nairobi goes back fifty years.



Nice Place Foundation

We attended the opening of a shelter named “Nice Place” for girls facing traditional tribal FGM. It’s near Loitokitok, Kenya, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The founder is Nice Lengete, a young Maasai woman advocate. A Dutch organization is the funder and AMREF is a major supporter. The location is near my boyhood home at Lasit.

With an AMREF driver and vehicle we drove southward from Nairobi through long stretches of very sparsely inhabited Maasai scrubland. We came to Osinet where a once verdant river crossing has been smothered in shanty commercial development. An electri-cal fence protects this from the adjacent Kimana Swamp wildlife protected area. There we (and Ernest Hemingway) used to camp in Eden-like surroundings.

We turned onto the track to Amboseli and thence onto a side track to the brand new residential facility called “Nice Place.” A Dutch philanthropic group working through AMREF have funded a residential shelter for girls who wish to avoid traditional circumci-sion (FGM = female genital mutilation). Today was the grand open-ing of Nice Place and it had “full court press” government endorse-ment. This involved ornamental tents, chairs, endless speeches, for-mal gifts and food. The local Maa people were organized in their traditional garb and performed song/dance rituals.

The idea of freedom from FGM goes far back in missionary work. But FGM is such a deeply rooted part of the culture it has been hard to get out into public discussion. At this affair little was said about the psychological implications or effects. I was mentioned in some of the speeches, but only in connection with AMREF, no men-tion of Lasit mission of my parents in the 1920s through 1940s. They were deeply troubled by FGM, but had to be excruciatingly careful in opposing it. A lady at Kijabe, Hulda Stumpf, was murdered because of her opposition to FGM in the Kikuyu context, in the 1920s.

www.niceplacefoundation.org 

Family Transport: Then and Now

We returned to Nairobi at 60 mph on nice tarmac where we used to plod along at 15 mph in our Model T en route to Simba station to catch the train to Rift Valley Academy.

During my lifetime East Africa has been playing constant “catch-up” in transportation. Foreign aid and technology have made the highways wider, stronger and safer.

We passed a large cement plant which is gouging out a hill for material with which to plaster the skyline of Nairobi with high-rises. We returned to Nairobi traversing spaghetti-like overpasses a-building which are trying, not very successfully, to keep ahead of traffic growth.

The “ART Bus scramble” in Albuquerque, N.M., U.S.A. was mild by comparison!

This has been a most gratifying two weeks. Important contributory factors have been Marilyn and Emily’s liaison skills. Steve’s skill at the wheel and the power and comfort of the Range Rover.

Chapter One: Tanzania
Chapter Three: Kilimanjaro 

Books by Roy D. Shafer MD
Shafari © 2018 
Roy's Letters from East Africa © 2022


 

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