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For the Love of Goat

      We had left the luxurious confines of some missionary friends' house, so different from the little concrete boxes that we lived in. From Nakuru we headed north through the area where the Kenyan president was from, an area that had received much benefit from all the aid coming in to the Kenyan treasury. There, at one of the many stops that public transport makes, we saw something for sale that we had not seen in over a year and a half, a watermelon from an irrigation scheme. We carried one the size of a small baby in our laps the rest of the way to Lake Baringo. My fiancé and I found lodging in a quaint rest house with half-log walls and a thatch roof. Sitting under a wide porch that overlooked the lake and the Njemps, in their curious canoes that they paddled with their hands, we read, and feasted on watermelon. Our own little villages were not touristy, and sitting outside, even though we knew many people, became an invitation to wholesale staring events. It was glorious to sit feasting on Pringles and watermelon with no one to care.

      Fast forward to that evening as we settled down to sleep. Rain had started to fall, settling the dust, and as we were just about to sleep there was a knock on the door.

      "Would you like another room? It is raining."

      "Thanks, but we're fine."

      It seems that we visited Baringo when one of the very few rainstorms went through. I would swear that, almost as soon as the manager got far enough away that he couldn't hear us, the rain picked up. Not a problem, we had been in the country during El Niño when it hadn't stopped raining for five months. We'll just roll over and go to sleep. Now I don't fall asleep as quickly as my fiancé, never have. I thought the dripping I heard was from the overhang, but then it got louder and nearer my head.

      "Hey, I'm turning on the light."

      By the light of a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, we saw running down the picturesque log and cement walls a literal torrent of water. The roof needed a bit of work, to say the least. In their defense there was no need for it, it didn't rain much. We travel light, only what can fit in a bag small enough to sit on our laps and we had them packed quickly. It was raining in sheets when we dashed up to the main building.

      "Now we need another room."

      The manager smiled and led us to a concrete box a lot like the ones we have to live in every day. Is this when I should mention that there was a party going on in the other room? Standing on the bed, we looked through a vent in the wall and saw the local revelers at a table. There is no way to sleep with all the noise, but then we're engaged and we only see each other on weekends. We can't even call the other up during the week, neither of us had a phone, let alone running water. The bed was too squeaky, but there was always the floor.

      For the third time that night we try to go to sleep. The roof over our heads was metal and in the rain sounded like a drum concert, the party next door had cleared off finally, and the building is in darkness. We were almost asleep when a goat, a cute little white kid that my fiancé had petted as we lounged on the porch of our original room, started bleating. Being a kid the owner had put him inside out of the rain, not a problem except his mother was on the other side of us in the courtyard. Moreover, the manager went home so he wasn't there to hear it.

      "You awake?" my fiancé asks. It was probably three in the morning by now.

      "Like I can sleep," I moan.

      "How much do you think that goat is worth?"

      I smile. "Oh probably not more than 800 shillings."

P.S. No goats were harmed in the living of this story, but oh, the cooking we did mentally as dawn tinged the sky without a wink of sleep.

More about Lake Baringo:

Lake Baringo is, after Lake Turkana, the most northern of the Great Rift Valley lakes of Kenya, with a surface area of about 130 km² and an elevation of 3200 ft. The lake is fed by two rivers, El Molo and Ol Arabel, and has no obvious outlet; the waters seep into lava. Despite this, it is one of the two freshwater lakes in the Rift Valley in Kenya, the other being Lake Naivasha. It lies off the beaten track in a hot and dusty setting and over 470 species of birds have been recorded there, occasionally including migrating flamingos. A Goliath Heronry is located on a rocky islet in the lake known as Gibraltar.

The area is little affected by tourism and is situated at the southern end of a region of Kenya inhabited largely by pastoralist ethnic groups including Il Chamus Rendille, Turkana and Kalenjin.

Fish stocks in the lake are now low and water levels have been reduced by droughts and over- irrigation. The lake has several small islands, by far the largest being Ol Kokwe Island. The main town on its shore is Loruk, while smaller settlements include Kampi ya Samaki.

Information from Wikipedia Encyclopedia