What Runs Beneath
Herders near Lake Turkana. Photo by Robin Hutton via Flickr. At dawn, there had been only desert, scrub, a few thorn trees. But as the sky blued, dozens of goats and cows crested a sand dune, unfurling like a wave. Their shepherds came next, rail-thin men wrapped in bright patterned cloth. Wielding staffs of gnarled branches, they herded their livestock towards a mass of spiny shrubs. Then, they waited.
This was the animal market of Lodwar, a daily event that had brought together livestock owners and buyers for generations. Life moved to old rhythms here in Turkana, Kenya’s most northwesterly region and among its most arid. But that was starting to change, which was why I had come.
“Are you ready?” Maurice asked. A Turkana native, he oversaw local operations for the British charity that employed us both. The first thing I’d noticed about him was his pants, pressed to a brutal crispness. The second was how his face, lean and lightly grooved like the bark of a young tree, showed no fatigue from picking up another colleague and me early that morning from the airstrip with only a thin slice of moon lighting his way.
For twenty years, the charity we worked for had provided food, water pumps, and animal medicines to the region’s pastoralists, who made up most of its inhabitants; the soil here has long been too dry to farm. But in 2011, those remedies proved to be no match for the drought that racked East Africa, the worst in 60 years. The international community was caught off guard — not necessarily by the emergency itself, which had been forecast for months, but by the speed and scale of its obliteration. Crisis meetings were called; emergency rations air-dropped. None of it was enough. Over 260,000 people perished, many of them refugees and pastoralists.
In the aftermath, donors declared it was time to do aid differently, to find innovative, lasting ways of making the region and its people self-sufficient. But the nonprofit industry has never been known for its agility. Some years on, its funds shriveled from failing to meet donors’ demands for fresh ideas, the British charity hired me — twenty-six, fresh out of grad school, and cheap for an economist. My terms of reference were lofty, tasking me with “identifying new economic opportunities for the impoverished communities of Turkana.”
Were they delusional, or was I? That day outside the animal market, I practically shook with nervous self-importance: finally, a chance to apply years of studying how countries got rich, all those obtuse theories and variables, to a place that needed exactly that sort of help.
“Yes, we’re ready,” I told Maurice. Alexis, the thirty-something “partnership expert” from the charity’s London headquarters who had flown in with me from Nairobi, nodded his assent. I didn’t know what his title meant, and he hadn’t explained; I guessed it had something to do with fundraising.
Maurice led us to four herders squatting under a fan palm, introducing us in Turkana. I caught our names followed by “England” and “America” and before I could correct him — I was Canadian — he’d already moved on. The shepherds nodded as he spoke, their elbows resting on their knees. I marveled at how comfortable they looked, like they could stay that way for hours even though their butts did not touch the ground. They reminded me of my great-grandmother, who’d spent much of her life crouched over an earthen stove in her south Indian village — a life that had always seemed unimaginably far from my own.
“They are open for your questions,” Maurice said.
I looked down at the paper I clutched, the “Shepherd Interview Guide.” I’d drafted it in my mother’s home in Calgary, in my old bedroom, posters of The Matrix and V for Vendetta still taped to the walls. I’d skimmed a few studies on the economics of pastoralism, the Wikipedia page on Turkana, and jotted down the first questions that came to mind: What are all the ways they earn money? Why do they sell their animals when they do? How do they decide on the price that they are willing to sell at? What is their level of
