BASIR

Since you might be wondering where Basir is, this is how you get there. At twilight, you board a scented bus from Eastleigh in Nairobi that cruises through the desert at night like a lone crusader, its headlights carving a thin, solitary path through the darkness.

At dawn, you arrive at Wajir, legs swollen, armpits sticky, and board another dusty bus that packs sheep and passengers together. For another four hours you travel through the monotone of the endless desert, a world made of beige and silence, with the only thing differentiating one ‘bulla’ from the next being the turbaned mosques.

Something shimmers on the horizon like a diamond in the sand. When it sharpens into a minaret, you are in Eldas township. If there was competition for the most beautiful mosque in Kenya, the one in Eldas wins hands down. It rises from the small town like a dream from nowhere.

You then hop into another dustier bus and get a seat next to a boy with curly hair clutching a baby goat like a treasured doll. Everyone is chatting animatedly, almost too loudly, except yourself. The land stretches around endlessly. Everything looks far away, even the vast cloudless sky. There is nowhere you can hide in such vast emptiness. The bus becomes one with the landscape, swallowed by it, and just before sunset on day that you aren’t now sure of, you come to the last ‘bulla’ called Basir.

Worn out, tired, but different.

That’s how a decade ago I found myself in Basir. I was implementing a certain project that involved enumerating vulnerable households-which meant enumerating everyone, since everyone ‘was’ vulnerable. Including regal elders with beards dyed the colour of Royco, men who owned several camels and hundreds of goats yet insisted they were struggling like everyone else.

The area Chief, the only man around who could speak ‘proper’ Kiswahili, informed me that the task would take me three days at the least. His Kiswahili was three Somali words infused with one Swahili word-but somehow, we got along. Since there was no lodge nearby, the amiable administrator gladly adopted me and made it his duty to see that I was well fed.I was to sleep in his makeshift office that doubled as his guest wing.

Outside his dash, hut, were these jerricans that swayed in the wind, creaking softly. I didn’t ask what they were, lest I appeared snobbish. The chief’s wife busied herself with cooking ugali for me. She mixed flour, water, and a scoop of sugar, stirred the mix, then covered it with a lid. Ugali still. Somehow, in that humble open air kitchen, my ache of hunger felt duller, softened by the warmth of home.

When it got dark, Mrs Chief opened the hanging jerricans, grabbed one clucky hen, and disappeared into the kitchen. A few moments later, we were enjoying sugared ugali served with tender dooro-chicken-under the starry skies.

Just like during the day, the night stretched vast and tender, the stars blinking softly above, while the exotic taste of sugary ugali and spicy chicken made the world feel both infinite and intimately ours.

To date, the hanging chicken coops of Basir still hold a tenderness in my memory I can never explain.