Mitumba

A woman sits in the centre of a small square of grass. Encircling her, piled up as high as her head, are mounds of clothes. Beyond her small fortress sit other women, sometimes a man, each on their own small patch of grass, criss-crossed with narrow dirt pathways. This is the Mitumba, a clothes market that comes to town every Saturday. Each stall-holders specialises in a different type of clothing; sweatshirts, women's blouses, dresses, baby clothes, trainers, children's jumpers etc. It's the ultimate jumble sale.

One of our neighbours, Evelina, Maureen's mum, specialises in trainers. Over tea at her house one morning, a catholic music video playing in the background, she tells me how she started selling trainers to pay for her niece's school fees. Her sister died a few years ago, and her brother-in-law disappeared, leaving her to raise her sister's children as well as her own. She travels to Nairobi to buy the trainers from a warehouse filled with sacks of donated clothes and jumble. It's cheapest to buy an unopened sack of trainers, but Evelina prefers to go and choose the pairs she wants, 'that way you don't get any you can't use" she tells me.

Walking through the patchwork of stalls, people, mainly women, are busy rummaging while the stall holders call out their prices, "10-10" (each item is ten Shillings), "40 Bob". They stir the mounds of clothes with their hands, bringing the bottom layers up to the top, as the shoppers work their way methodically through each item. Lila and Uma dive into a pile of girls clothes, pulling out a sparkly pink cardigan and a fairy dress.

Down on the main street a man sits by the side of the road carefully unpicking the sole of an old shoe. Behind him rows of new soles hang neatly from a line of string, waiting to be sown on. Next to him, another man is intent on polishing up an old pair of brogues, readying them for sale in the market. Re-use. Re-cycle.

A man walks by wearing a stack of hats. Around his waist are slung dozens of beaded belts, from his outstretched arms hang bracelets, necklaces swing from his neck. He is a walking display cabinet, a portable shop. Adharanand stops to look at a stall of running trainers, laid out in pairs on the ground in front of a rubbish-strewn ditch. Running trainers are big business here in Iten, Evelina told me she sold a whole sack of them during the course of one Saturday.

Over there a woman is selling corn, cooking it over charcoal. Next to her another lady has sugarcane. We buy some, and she slices it with a machete, quartering the stalk so we can suck on the woody insides, the sticky juice running down our fingers. A man cycles past with a sofa strung to the back of his bike. The market goes on all day, until it gets too dark to see.