The below written in Ngurunit a few days ago:

15 June 2017

Countless.  The flow of people through my house this morning is countless.  I am in Ngurunit.  Loiweti and I arrived with dogs Bruin and Mouse last evening after a long trip from Maralal.  We had to make several stops along the way to drop boxes of Rotary project books off at Primary schools so it made the travel time a bit longer than usual.  Since this morning, I have had countless visits from various local family and community members bringing milk, eggs, baskets for sale or nothing at all.  Everyone with their hands out looking for a bit of cash to help buy food for their households.  This is a common practice within the Samburu Culture and even has a specific word for it: mparin (approximate spelling as I hear the word that I can barely pronounce correctly).  It is a social networking practice more than simple begging, which many outsiders take it to be.  In the past, mparin was a way to help those who were having difficulties survive through it.  People would help by giving out a goat, a cow or whatever they had.  Then, if disaster struck them, they would be able to have their past favor returned when they went on mparin.    It was a great form of welfare for everyone and bonded communities together.  It is still there within the culture but the way of implementing has greatly changed since the advent of education, formal jobs and a cash economy.  It tends to be skewed towards everyone without a job coming to those with jobs and asking for money.  It is rarely turned around as a favor given and a favor returned later.  It can become a big burden on those who have the jobs.  When one starts working, it is not just for your own family, but the whole community.  We have had to deal with this issue always.  It can be a huge problem if no boundaries are set.  We have dealt with it in several ways.  One is by me letting all the members of the groups I work with know that my home is off bounds for mparin.  I am working with them on income generation projects and to have them come ask straight out for money would be very hard on me as I work with over 500 women.  If everyone came regularly, I would never be able to help myself, much less them.  By and large everyone respects that.  Sometimes a desperate case of illness or other family emergency comes up.  For these, we can do a case by case assistance.  School fees requests are referred to the PEAR Innovations school bursary program.  Then there are the regular old people we affectionately call our pensioners.  A select group of very old mamas, and a few men, who really have no support from anywhere else are given a bit every month to help them survive.  There are no old people homes here so the community social structure must watch out for them.  We do our part with a bit of cash or food now and then.  Others help them build houses and generally take care of them within the homestead structures.  They live and survive the best they can on peoples’ kindness.  All of this works very well for us, except lately there has been a drought and everyone is hurting.  That is one of the main causes of my constant stream of mparin seekers this morning.  We have had some rain, but not enough really and livestock is still recovering so not producing much for people to live on.  Market prices for livestock are still low with animals also still too thin really to fetch a good price.   One good thing I have seen this morning is that milk is starting to flow.  I had several people bring milk with them so it was more an exchange of gifts than one way cash from me to them.  I now have a pot of camel milk and a pot of cow milk.  I have been getting camel milk all through the drought as camels can produce throughout, but this is the first cow milk I have seen for over a year.  So happy to see it.  But not sure how long it will be available if it doesn’t rain some more.  Everything is green, but only on the surface.  We still need a lot more rain to soak deep and keep things green for longer.  Mperiyon, my sister-in-law, was saying yesterday that grass is still scarce and the cows are surviving more on leaves that the owners cut from the trees with back breaking work.  She warned that the cows are fat now, but most of the leaves are gone now too, so unless we get more rain, the cattle will start to grow thin and die.  One of the jobs we have for Loiweti on his home visit is to collect together all the marketable bulls and go sell them before they start to lose condition.  One can never depend on the rains these days with climate change very, very evident in our part of the world.  No predictability any more on seasons.  I want to sell all the goats we can too.  Better to have the money in the bank than on the hoof.  Less likely to lose it that way.  Though to do that, we have to argue with the family as in the pastoralist life, they feel more sure about their wealth when they can see it grazing around them.  In good seasons, the increase is faster too in the form of calves, kids and lambs, but in bad seasons (drought), this ‘interest’, as well as the principal, can disappear fast.  So this time, we hope to convert as much as possible into a more secure form!