Turtles

There’s a round hole in the white sand, deep, the size of a large bucket. An elderly man is bent over it, a pair of surgical gloves pulled over his bony hands, delicately brushing the sand away from the centre.

He uncovers what looks like a flat black pebble, the edge pointing upwards. It moves, lifting up out of the sand towards the light. A newborn turtle emerges from its sandy nest followed by another, and another.

The old man continues to brush away the sand, unearthing a heap of flippers and outstretched necks, moving for the first time. Their heads push forwards, sensing the ocean nearby. They scramble up to the rim of the hole and slide down the slope towards the sea.

Their movements are wobbly, clumsy, child-like, comical. A footprint in the sand becomes a crater to fall into, a pebble knocks one onto it’s back, four flippers waving desperately, it’s whole body arched in an attempt to right itself.

On either side the crabs are gathering, eyes alert, waiting for their opportunity to attack. It will not come today, there are too many humans on guard.

Others in the nest are dopey, lacking the strength to pull themselves over the edge. And some are dead. We stroke their silky smooth shells and velvet necks. They fit into the palm of my hand.

The old man gathers the weakest into a bucket with the remains of the round white egg shells, evidence of how many hatched from that nest. He will release them tomorrow or the next day, once they are strong enough to make their journey to the sea.

The first turtle has reached the shore line and stops, hesitates. The sea pulls back from the beach and draws itself up into a wave, towering above the turtle’s head. The vulnerable turtle confronts the all powerful ocean, tiny in the face of this immensity. Trusting. The wave comes rushing in, the turtle disappears inside it. Gone.

Black cotton

We are driving through Lewa, on our way to spend the night with Al’s sister Caroline. It is hot and Lila, Uma, Evie and Lali are sitting on the roof of the car, their legs dangling down through the sun roof.

Out of the window we pass Acacia trees, zebra grazing on the dry, silvery grass, giraffe. Out of the corner of my eye I see two golden mounds of earth, smooth and rounded. One lift’s it head. It is a male lion, a pair of them, huge, basking in the sun.

Al drives off the dirt road into the bush to get a closer look. As we stop a lioness lifts herself up out of the long grass where she has been sleeping, just a few meters from us. She eyes us sleepily, and walks slowly over to join the other lions.

We are spellbound, even the children fall silent. The male lions only glance over at us, not bothering to get up, turning their heads instead to gaze at the distant herd of buffalo.

We are late for lunch, so we drive on, crossing a small river and up into the dusty hills. Al tells me how the rains have failed, the watering holes are all drying up, the grass is yellowing. We pass the cracked dusty basin of a dried up lake. A solitary zebra watches us go.

But now, as we drive, the sky slowly darkens, brilliant blue sinking into a deep, bruised purple. The grasses begin to glow with an electric light, the low rumble of thunder moving closer. As the temperature drops we start to shiver.

Suddenly it starts to rain, hard. Within a few minutes the dusty dirt road has turned to black, slippery mud, known as Black Cotton. The car tyres struggle to grip it’s surface, slipping and sliding, skidding in circles. The roads are hump-backed, with ditches on either side, and it takes all Al’s strength not to fall into the ditch.

Up ahead we see a land rover horizontal across the road, it’s back tyres sunk into the ditch. There is no way past it. We decide to drive out into the bush, over the grass where there’ll be more traction, following the direction of the road.

As we draw level with the Land Rover it’s driver walks towards us through the rain. He is a friend of Al's, and has called for a truck to come and tow him out. We offer him a lift, but he doesn’t want to leave his car, which is full of provisions.

The tyres are managing well on the grass, but the ground is rough, full of dips and holes, and now large rocks. We can’t continue, and have to try and get back onto the road. But there is now a ridge, dropping down into a ditch, between us and the road, and the rain is getting heavier.

Lali and Evie are unperturbed, they are Bush Girls, they tell me, and have seen it all before. “Bush Girls aren’t scared” says Evie excitedly. But Lila and Uma don’t see the adventure of it. As Alastair attempts to drive up the ridge for the fourth time, the wheels spinning wildly in the mud, the car lurching over to one side like a ship in a stormy sea, Uma and lila start to cry.

“Are you trying to kill us?” Lila screams, as Uma sobs into her hands and begs us to let her get out and walk. I take the wheel while Al gets out and tries to position large boulders under the wheels of the car. I rev the engine, but nothing happens.

We are stuck, the belly of the car resting on the hump of the ridge, with only one front and one back wheel touching the ground. With no mobile signal, and still a fair way from Caroline’s house, there is nothing to do but sit and wait. Hopefully, she’ll realize something’s up and come and rescue us.

She does. We see her reversing down the centre of the road towards us, slipping from side to side. She later told us she had reversed as she knew how hard it would be to turn around in that mud. Lila and Uma scramble up into her solid Land Rover, feeling braver now, managing a smile.

Al and Caroline fix up a tow rope and haul Al’s car off the ridge and back onto the road. It is towed all the way back to Caroline’s house, its wheel arches so clogged with mud the wheels can barely turn.

Addis Ababa

We are walking down the street in the centre of Addis. People smile, nobody stares, Ossian gets a kiss and then another from passersby. Women walk by in traditional white dresses and shawls, majestic hair braids, passing young girls in skinny jeans and big hairdos.

Rubbish fills the gutters, piled up on the sides of the dirt roads, trodden into the muddy ground. A light rain falls, severed goats heads lie in the dirty puddles, leftover from the end of fasting celebrations over the easter weekend. This was one of the first countries in the world to adopt christianity as the official religion, and orthodox christianity remains the dominant religion.

Donkeys and emancipated horses pull wooden carts, a heard of goats walks through the traffic. Blue and white Lada taxis, remnants of Ethiopia’s communist era, drive by in varying degrees of dilapidation.

There are beggars, old women, children, a naked man curled into the fetus position, whole families begging. Buildings of corrugated iron sit beside four star hotels and palaces, Ethiopia had one of the oldest monarchies in the world.

Now here is an open space, the debris of doors and windows pressed into the dirt. We are told there used to be houses here, a whole community flattened to make way for a new road. There has been no compensation, and people are picking through the debris, looking for anything they can salvage.

We stop for lunch in one of the many pizzerias, the influence of five years of Italian occupation, the closest Ethiopia has come to being colonized. Next door there is an ice-cream parlor.

A group of men in overalls stand on the pavement welding seats into a parked car, arabic-sounding pop music playing from the doorway behind them. “Salama” the people greet us, “peace be with you’”.

Kapsoi

Adharanand and I are walking home from the Mitumba. We step off the tarmac road onto the the dirt road that leads to our neighbourhood, Kapsoi. There are people walking, familiar faces, a boy with a stick herding two cows, an old man. We great each other as we pass.

At the end of the dirt road is the kiosk selling milk and sweets. Lila is sitting behind the counter with a young baby, Mercy, on her lap, while Mercy’s mother serves a customer.

Just outside the door to the kiosk, Uma has set up shop on rickety bamboo table, usually used for selling cabbages and spinach. She is selling a selection of stones. A few children are gathered in front of her stall, pretending to buy them.

A neighbor, Sarah, stops to talk. I tell her we are leaving Iten in a few days time. She asks about my house in England. “Do you own a cow there?”

“No”

“Why not?” she looks at me with a mixture of disbelief and pity, “You must buy one when you get home”.

Back at our house, there are voices coming from the vegetable patch. Ossian and Flora emerge from the tangle of vines with pockets full of passion fruit and tree tomatoes.

We sit on the grassy slope in the garden eating them, watching mousebirds flying in and out of the vines. A neighbours' cow is mooing, a baby crying.

As the sky darkens Adharanand goes to look for Lila an Uma. He finds them down a narrow pathway, inside a small wooden shack, drinking sweet milky Kenyan tea and watching Kalenjin music videos with their friends.

School pick up

I am collecting Lila and Uma from school today. I wait for them to come out of class in the little grass square in the centre of the school buildings.

Uma comes first, holding firmly onto Hilda’s hand, talking and smiling. “We learnt that there’s air in the soil today” she tells me, taking my hand. She explains how they took it in turns to pour water on the soil, watching as little air bubbles burst on the surface of the soil.

Lila is a while coming, so we watch the children leaving to go home for lunch. A teacher comes over and greets us, taking Uma’s hand “hello again my friend” she says.

Then we see Lila, looking pleased, walking with Maureen and Brenda. She spots us and slows down, taking the long path round the square to avoid walking with us.

Uma and I walk ahead with Hilda, Uma chatting away, her rucksack on her back like all the other children. Lila is behind us, lingering with her friends, waiting for us to move out of sight.

The wind is blowing the dust around, in our eyes and mouths. We cross the main road, children fanning out across the road and disappearing into doorways and down alleyways.

Lila runs over to us, “Maureen wants to show me her mother’s shop”. Mama Maureen has a kiosk set back from the main road, selling sodas and secondhand running trainers. The girls get a soda each.

On the way up the hill I stop to buy some food from the little supermarket and the girls walk on home together. Here even the youngest children usually walk to school without an adult, accompanied instead by older friends or siblings.

Back home Lila and Uma show me their exercise books in which they have been copying lines of Swahili off the blackboard. Brenda has helped Uma with hers. The teacher sat in the staffroom marking, the children bringing their work to be checked and then returning to class to continue unsupervised.

Although Lila and Uma have enjoyed school, it was a long day for them and they are both tired. Too many questions and stares from the other children. It is a few days before they are ready to go again.

Rose

We are sitting, Adharanand, Ossian, Uma and I, on a small sofa in a dim room. Light is pushing in at the open doorway behind us, and from a window on the wall by the door, but the back of the room remains in shadow. Opposite our sofa, in touching distance, is a bunk bed, the top bunk missing, broken. A mattress is rolled up in the corner under the window. In the shadows, a water tank, gas cooker, some bundles. Overhead, an energy saving light bulb. A stool, covered with a cloth, acts as a table, an old sweatshirt is a doormat. We are at the home of Rose and her four children, Mark, Joseph, Jasmine and Natasha.

We first met Rose on an old school bus, driving to the start of the women's race organised by the Iten town council. She squeezed through the crowd waiting to board the bus, climbing on behind us, and sitting down on the empty seat next to me. Little, slight, with a shy smile, she told us she was in training as an athlete, despite an injury to her left hip that caused her to limp slightly.

The bus pulled up at the start of the race and the engine stopped. All the passengers leapt up from their seats and started pulling off their clothes, stripping down to lycra pants and vests. Excited, chatting, they sprinted off the bus and over to a lone shed in the corner of a field, the loo. Before the last of them had managed to get off the bus, the race organisers were calling for the race to start, and within seconds they were off, disappearing down the road we had just driven along, Rose struggling along near the back.

Rose gets up before 5 o'clock every morning to go for a morning run with her training partner, a Ugandan lady called Jen who runs for the Ugandan national team, leaving her children sleeping at home. Her husband has left her. Jen is talking now, sitting on Rose's broken bunk bed, answering my question about how things are now in Uganda. There have just been peaceful elections for the first time in many years. She tells us that people have had enough of the fighting, especially the women. When there is fighting, she says it's the women who suffer the most. The men simply run away, but the women cannot leave their children, and cannot run carrying them. There are women in Uganda with no eyes, others with no breasts, or no nose, no ears, sometimes no mouth. Cut off during the fighting.

We sit drinking milky tea and eating slices of white bread. Rose's daughters fall asleep on the bottom bunk. They are not well, a fever. They came round to visit us the other day, sitting quietly on the sofa in our sitting room staring at Lila and Uma. They do not speak English, most people learn English in school, and Lila and Uma know only a few words in Swahili. They played with the dolls for a while, then all went outside to play catch with a ball. Rose told us she had no food at home that day, that they had only had tea to drink for the last two days.

Rose's home is in a courtyard made up of identical, single-room dwellings. Cloth's hang over the doorways, women come in and out, slow and busy. One is washing the dishes in a bucket outside, another washes clothes and hangs them up to dry. In the centre of the grassy courtyard is a water pump, below it a muddy ditch, a makeshift swing, sheep, rubbish. It is raining gently, above us a rainbow.

Uma is delighted with the swing, made from a wooden frame with a loop of rope. Mark lowers if for her, he speaks English well. Ossian is delighted with the sheep. He trots after them, throwing stones and laughing. Now Uma is jumping back and forth over the muddy ditch, a group of small children watching her with surprise. One of her shoes falls off and gets covered in mud. Mark pumps some water from the well and cleans it for her.

We finish our tea and step outside to say goodbye. The children are playing with a football. By the front door stands a collection of old containers and tubs. Rose has planted flowers in them, "I love flowers" she tells me. We walk home at dusk, kerosine lamps lit in the shops, the streets busy, bustling still. Uma is chatting away, "Was Mark the first born?", "And who was the second born?", "Mummy, don't tell Lila about the swing, I want to tell her first". A choir is singing in the little park, a crowd has gathered to listen. We arrive home in the dark.

Market

On the other side of the town's playing field, behind the District Works Office, is the fruit and veg market. Open air, the wooden stalls shaded by corrugated roofs, it is open everyday from dawn till dusk. At the entrance sit the charcoal sellers. Two women perch on wooden stools, their hands working away at some crocheting while their eyes watch the passers-by. Their children sit next to them on the ground, waving to us. Behind them, a line of huge white sacks, the tops stuffed with leaves to stop the charcoal from falling out.

You enter the market through big, wide metal gates. Stalls run all around the edge of the square, one row in the centre. The pitches by the gates are brimming with food, the pitches at the back end are almost all deserted. On our first visit we walked the full circuit of stalls, interested to see what each one sold. They all sell the same. Our progress was slow as each stall-holder, all of them women, was keen to greet us, wanting to know our names and where we came from. We stopped to talk with a lady called Virginia, her two young children sleeping under the shade of the tin roof while she worked. She told me that they accompany her everyday to the market. This will be their playground until they are old enough to go to school.

Now we are regular customers at Filomena's stall, a few pitches in from the gate. From the roof hang bunches of bananas, bags of carrots and garlics, and piled up under it's shade are mounds of tomatoes, green oranges, mango, papaya and sweet potatoes, bunches of spinach and chard. Standing off the ground on wooden pallets are sacks of grains, rice, millet, kidney beans and tiny dried-up silver fish. She tells me she buys the produce direct from the farmers, who deliver it to the market in their vans. One day we saw one of these vans arriving, and a tug-of-war broke out among the stall-holders at the far end over the bags of grain.

Ossian loves to dig his hands into the grains, letting them spill over onto the floor. Usually one of the market ladies will come over and try to pick him up, making him shout out crossly and forget what he's doing. Filomena chats to us as she serves us, offering Uma a banana and asking her if she will stay and help her with the stall. Uma shakes her head shyly, watching in amazement as Filomena keeps a tally of how much we owe her, scratching the numbers onto the back of her weathered hand with a knife.

The lady next to her is knitting a jumper for her son while she waits for customers, expertly working a Fairisle design onto the front of it. Some of the stall-holders stand chatting to each other, watching the shoppers walking in through the gates. Others are busy talking on their mobile phones. All of them are wearing skirts and long aprons.

We load our shopping into a bag and set off, walking down the path to the playing field and the shortcut home, followed by curious stares and excited laughter.