First Contact

by Geoffrey Clarfield (November 2012)

We had been vaccinated against tropical diseases, took malaria tablets regularly and slept under mosquito nets. We had our bags strapped to the roof rack, two government escorts with automatic weapons ready for use, a child in the back seat, we had typewriters, note pads, first aid kits, maps, tents and enough tinned food and medicine for a month until we would need to drive back to Isiolo to restock our supplies.

Marsabit town, where we were heading, was known to be cut off by torrential rivers that are dry as dust for most of the year but during the rainy seasons dormant river beds would burst their banks, drown unsuspecting herdsmen in a few minutes and wash away large sections of the road.

During one of these floods a Roman Catholic priest, out preaching the gospel climbed a tree and was stuck there for three days while the waters raged below, like Noah on Mount Ararat, until he was finally rescued by a Toyota Land cruiser like ours with the fancy fangled snorkel like intake pipe that takes in air from a foot above the roof of the car, eight feet off the ground.

Our Rendille visitor had never been to a clinic, was not vaccinated, and had survived an excruciating circumcision ceremony at the age of sixteen or eighteen. He regularly, slept on the ground in the open and on occasion traveled by foot with a gourd of water that carried no more than a liter of fluid. At the same time he and three or four of his fellow age mates would on occasion take a cow, kill it, spend the next four days consuming it, put on many kilos in a short space of time and then not eat anything for more than a week.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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