End of the Line

July 20: Our plan had been going well. Each day we have been getting further down the river. We figured that two more days and we would have the whole transect finished. It was going well, perhaps too well....

We departed the Center directly after breakfast, just like the previous three days. The plan was to head downstream from where we had left off the previous day. However, soon after leaving the main road, we encountered the first of the day's snafus. A large irrigation ditch which ran across the road was full of running water. It was unusual to see so much running water out of the river, which was interesting. It was also problematic as we needed to get across. Our vehicle is an 11 passenger Land Rover, the work horse of Kenya, and our intrepid driver Sapaya gunned the engine and started across. Half way we heard (and felt) the undercarrage land firmly on a large rock. This entailed us piling out of the vehicle while local appeared out of the bush to help us dig the rock out and work the vehicle across the ditch. The entire process took about a half hour and really demonstrated the challenges of traveling in the Kenya backcountry.

Ten minutes later saw us again stuck in an irrigation canal, and again pushing the vehicle out of the mud. I was surprised to see all the water flowing in the canals, but we soon discovered the water's source...

When we arived at the river bank, there was no river to be seen. A thin muddy trickle remained from the flow we had seen a mere two kilometers upstream the day before. Every bit of water had beeen diverted to the irrigation canals we had crossed. Speaking to the Maasai who were gathered near our vehicle when we stopped, we discovered that since there was so little water, a committee had been organized to allow farmers along the river to divert the water, each in turn, to feed their fields. The group we spoke to were cutting brush in preperation for their turn to divert the water the following day. It is truly amazing how little water is keeping this community alive.

Instead of going back and dealing with the irrigation ditches, we drove across the empty river bank and drove upstream to where the diversion had been constructed. It was just below the station we had sampled the day previous. The farmers had build a dam out of brush and logs which diverted the flow into a large hand-dug canal flowing along tomato fields. The entire process looked extremely labor-intensive and there was not a tractor or backhoe to be seen. It is a back-breaking existance these folks live.

With this development, it was clear that the river portion of our project was over. The second leg of the work involves the sampling of boreholes (a kind of well) and natural springs. We spent the next three hours or so bouncing across parched landscape to sample two different boreholes. These are holes dug into the desert with pumps attached to supply water to folks who live too far to walk to the river. The first of these had a large T-handle pump to bring the water to the surface. The second, suprisingly had a small generator-powered pump which could be switched on to make the water flow into a trough for cattle to drink. In this part of the landscape, there are only cattle and goats - there's not nearly enough water to farm anything. It's only adjacent to the river where farming is at all possible.

We only managed to get stuck in dry ditches a couple of times on our way out of the bush. The entire adventure took us a bit longer than planned, but we made it back to the Center by mid-afternoon and Jim and I returned to our little lab set up off the main dining area. Saturday is going to be a "lab day" where we catch up on some of the chemical analysis that needs to be done. We plan to sample some of the water from the spring-fed stream that flows through the Center's property though. We thought it would be nice to give our hosts some "local data" on their own water.