Don't eat the matumbo

This is the sympathy-seeking illness post – if my bowel movements or self-obsession bore you, please look away now (although obviously I can't understand why you'd find either anything less than riveting).

Things come in twos and threes. I've been very lucky so far in Kenya – I haven't had the faintest bit of stomach trouble, despite travelling quite a lot, and eating more meat than I've ever eaten in my entire life. Until last week – which also happened to be my last week in Nakuru, trying to get everything finished up work-wise, and to get myself organised to move on to Nairobi.

From Monday to Wednesday I was in Churo in East Pokot, further up the Rift Valley: an astonishingly barren place that seems to have been forgotten by the government, the NGOs, and modernity. My organisation's conflict management interventions here are also worse than useless: like holding a seminar for famine victims. It's a place full of cows, where a cup of milk costs more than in Nairobi (the drought has made the local cows dry up, and transport costs for packaged milk are enormous). It's the only place in Kenya I've seen some children go to school naked (not out of charming traditional practice, because their families can no longer afford clothes during the dry season).

Shamefully, this neglect is at least partly to do with the fact that everybody seems to hate the Pokots – and the community leaders of the Pokots, at least, seem to hate everybody. Hating the Pokots, in fact, seems to be the one thing that unites communities in the Rift Valley. Samburu and Turkana groups, for example, are engaged in intensifying fighting and cattle-rustling against each other, but in several places have been brought together in a kind of grim peace to fight Pokot raiders. More significantly, Pokot politicians are even less important than Samburu and Turkana MPs (themselves junior acolytes to the 'Rift Valley mafia' which, along with Kikuyu-dominated Central Province MPs form the two major power blocs in Kenya's parliament). So Pokot politicians don't get to 'eat' at all when the spoils are carved up in Nairobi.

Anyway, more about East Pokot, the land the do-gooders forgot, later on. This post is all about ME!

The only thing to (actually) eat in Churo on Tuesday was matumbo ya mbuzi – goat intestines, which, quite literally, tasted of shit. I only ate a small amount, with a lot of maize to compensate. And felt absolutely fine for the next two days, and the journey back to Nakuru. And then, at precisely 4.17pm on Thursday afternoon, my digestive system melted.

I just about managed to get home, perched on the back of a boda-boda bicycle taxi (the quickest way to get home, and conveniently affording rapid dismount facilities for tactical chundering on the way). I make it up the four flights of stairs to the flat to find W, the building's security guard, standing outside the door waiting for me, and talking very fast in Kiswahili. Through the bilious haze I think he's saying that my (heavily pregnant) landlady is having a baby (anazaa), and that she needs me to come with him to the hospital. But I can't be sure. W speaks no English, and my Kiswahili is worse. I also don't tend to need much gynaecological vocabulary, day-to-day. I end up rudely ignoring him, and pushing my way through the front door. The flat, uncharacteristically, is empty. My landlady is nowhere to be seen.

This is very bad news. So now I'm on the floor of the bathroom, evacuating, er, dually, and simultaneously grappling with my Kiswahili-English dictionary trying to look up anazaa. As I'm doing this, W returns and starts hammering on the front door again, just as getting to 'Z' in my dictionary to find out that '-zaa' does indeed mean 'give birth'.

Fuck. This is now very bad news.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the words for “I'm being sick”, so am forced to just sit there idiotically shouting siwezi kuja (I can't come) and matumbo, matumbo (stomach, stomach) – which I now realise W the guard may have thought meant I was masturbating in the toilet while confirming my landlady's gravidity.

After about half an hour of hammering and evacuating, I'm ready to make the lunge to the front door. I open it, and W is still there heroically saying Esther anazaa, anazaa, kuja, kuja, asking me to come with him. So now my liquifying bowels are fighting my English 'rise-to-the-occasion' gynaecological chivalry. I want to ask where the fuck Esther's boyfriend is, but can't remember the vocab for 'boyfriend' or 'fuck' either.

What would Hugh Grant do? In the Hugh Grant film version there would be some hilarious schtick with Grant careering round the room flopping his hair about and apologising with his trousers round his ankles. In this version I don't have the energy for flopping or hilarity. There's just me, my bowels, and my useless Kiswahili.

Fortunately, I'm saved with cinematic good timing. Just as I'm about to improvise some kind of nappy/bib/plastic bag arrangement to use in a taxi, up the stairs comes...Esther. It turns out she's been to the hairdressers, which W the guard for some reason mistook as a dash to the obstetrics ward. So I'm released from my doorstep agony to retreat for the bathroom, where I stay for the next 24 hours.

Lesson 1

Englishmen: if you learn one foreign language phrase while travelling abroad, make sure it's “I can't come to the door, I'm shitting myself.” If necessary, tattoo it on a body part you can see while squatting.

Lesson 2

A loo-seat is the only essential accoutrement of civilisation. My Nakuru flat has one of only two real loo-seats I've seen outside of Nairobi. This single piece of technology improved my quality of life last week more than mobile phones, the internet and electrification put together.

How many councillors can you fit in a Land Rover?

The answer, it turns out, is twelve. Plus one mzungu, ten Samsonite luggage cases, and an AK-47.

(The AK barrel is just visible next to the driver in this picture)

Two weeks ago I was travelling with another staff member around Baragoi in northern Samburu District, south of Lake Turkana. Baragoi's a slightly odd place. On the one hand it's a typical small town in the arid northern grasslands. There's no electrification, guns and goats everywhere, and all the beers are warm and dusty, having been carried five hours on the roof of the bus (below) from Maralal, the nearest large-ish town (and, incidentally, the final, wind-stripped home of Wilfred Thesiger until his death in 1994). On the other hand, you can buy vodka alongside traditional busaa homebrew in almost all of Baragoi's seven or eight bars, and the main street is colloquially called Bosnia Street.

This is because Baragoi was the recruitment hub for the illiterate Samburu warriors plucked from the vast empty ranges of northern Kenya in the early 1990s, rapidly inducted into the Kenyan army, and sent as barely trained UN peacekeepers to patrol the Republic of Serbian Krajina, a self-proclaimed micro-state in eastern Croatia which existed for just four years before it was pummelled back under Croatian authority in 1995. These men came back, rich; bought cows, built bars and cheap lodging houses; and essentially melted back into Samburu society. Globalisation is strong. And weak.

Anyway, back to the Land Rover. Transport is a bit of a problem in northern Kenya. Amazingly, there's a bus which goes to Baragoi from Maralal. It doesn't go very often, but as you can see it's pretty bitching:



This bus bounces and inches its way over a 'road' which is mostly little more than a rocky track through the mountains. We got to sit in the cab. We listened to Lil' Wayne. It was awesome.

The journey back was a bit more complicated. Some local members of Samburu District Council, though, were on their way to Maralal at lunchtime on the day we wanted to leave, and offered to give us a lift. In theory, awesome. They had a Land Rover, and they were leaving right now, they said. Sasa sasa.

That's to say, after a few hours and a few more Tuskers. By 6pm, the driver had decided to go somewhere else, they said. But this was a good thing, they said: it's better to travel at night when it's cooler and the tyres don't puncture so easily.

(And the raiders like to hijack cars).

But the council chairman wants to sleep, they said. OK, so we leave at dawn. 6am. Sasa sasa. On the dot, they said.

That's to say, at 12 noon the next day. And there were now twelve people who they'd promised could go to Maralal. And they all had fancy, bulky, sharp-cornered Samsonite cases to put on top of us in the back. (They're local politicians. They have nice luggage). So only one of the two of us could go to Maralal, they said

Actually, we both went. We just took it in turns to make human-Samsonite-human sandwiches in the back of the Land Rover. I'm still not totally sure why we brought the Kalashnikov. Still, as I know from Manchester, council politics can be rough...

Grenade geekery update

I felt my professional [sic] reputation was somewhat at risk if I left that rifle grenade go unidentified. With regular access to the internet, I've checked it now, and am 99.9% certain it was a Yugoslav M60P1 30mm rifle grenade.

So, not very interesting, and could have come from almost anywhere. Still, it does underline the fact that Kenyan forces actually use a fair bit of Eastern European-spec weaponry, at least in terms of their SALW - in contrast to the assertions of a number of 'arms experts', who told the media around the time of the MV Faina "arms to Kenya/Sudan" episode that Kenyan forces didn't use any former Soviet bloc weaponry (and thus that the T-72 tanks, AKM rifles and multiple rocket launchers on the MV Faina were unlikely to be for Kenya). So much for that. Yugoslavia/Serbia's arms industry is, admittedly, something of a bridgehead between NATO-standard and former-Soviet specs and calibres. But I've also seen lots of Kenyan police with AK-47s and AKMs, including both former Soviet types and Type 56-2s.

I really need to get a new job.