BORANA.NET
My field work in East Africa
The field work and the team
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The following four pictures illustrate the enumerators and me at work, conducting interviews. Although
it is recommended that the respondents are interviewed alone, we always attracted many children
who eventually witnessed the whole interview.
- On the next picture we were waiting for a truck to give us and the others a lift from Yabello to Didi Hara.
We waited probably for ages.....
- The next picture shows part of the team and me celebrating my 27th birthday in a small (if not the only)
pub in Finchawa. Finchawa was the last village where we conducted interviews and from there we
followed the tarmac road back to Addis. The trip takes roughly 12 hours.
Accomodation
- Accommodation during the field work was very diverse. Sometimes we rented a whole “house”
where the team stayed and sometimes we asked local families for accommodation. The next picture
illustrates the house that we rented, for example, in Wachile.
The other pictures shows me being welcome in Salado's house in Wachile.
When we only had to stay for a short time in one area we simply asked village inhabitants to put us
up in their huts. We were never refused accommodation, rather were they happy to grant us
“asylum”. The next pictures shows the children of Salida, a family in Wachile (Ethiopia). I lived in their
house for almost 2 weeks before we went on to Finchawa.
-
I am having one of the haunting coffees. The coffee is made of whole beans (not
processed) which float in self-made butter. My glance says everything.....
Transportation
- Finally I would like to share unforgettable impressions about the way we moved from village to village
and from household to household (most of the time at a snail's pace…). I had different modes of
transportation: In Kenya I was most of the time the “owner” of a car provided by KARI (as seen
in picture 32) but in Ethiopia, the landscape was so harsh that we could not use the car to get in
touch with many nomadic living interviewees. On roads where only trucks can operate, we switched
to public transport, as described by the next picture. The Isuzu lorry is the most common mean of
transportation. When I had to go from Ethiopis to my resreach area in Northern Kenya, I used
public transport as well. The trucks that I used as a lift, came from Addis, went through Moyale and
Marsabit with their final destination Nairobi. They either transported livestock (in which case the
only available “seats” are the iron bars on top of the lorry) or sugar bags or other commodities. The
trip from Yabello to Marsabit takes 2 full days while the truck also travels by night. I did the trip
twice, once I was lucky to catch a truck full of sugar bags and I could sleep well on
one of them but on my second trip, I had to spend the night on top of the truck, with the Borana
cattle (ironically) underneath me. This trip was far the toughest that I have ever made. It took 36
hours in total. We drove by night and it was quite chilly and windy and by daytime the sun was
burning. The smell of clothes and backpacks that are knotted on the iron bars, weeks after the trip is
unforgettable.
- The trip from Nairobi to Marsabit and onwards to Moyale (bordering Ethiopia) takes two full days
and it has three stages: The first trip to Isiolo takes 12 hours by truck or 4 hours by mini-bus. The
second step includes changing vehicles in Isiolo and hopping onto a truck (at 4 am in the morning)
to Marsabit. In Marsabit one can either stay on the truck and go on to Moyale or have a break and
take a truck later on. Going from Marsabit to Moyale takes another 12 hours. The reason hwy it is
so harsh to get into the North of Kenya is, that unlike Ethiopia, Kenya never managed to tarmac or
even to maintain the road.
