Kenya dig it?

A couple of years ago, along with about a dozen other supporters, I visited Kajuki, a small village in Kenya, to see the work of a small UK charity called St Peter's Lifeline (to which I would urge you to donate. Visit: www.stpeterslifeline.org.uk). The charity supports the work of St Peter's primary school and community through education, micro finance, empowering girls, feeding programmes, clean water, sanitation and the prevention of disease. The community was extremely poor, with repeated periods of drought hitting its agricultural economy hard, but the people we met were, almost without exception, hard working, positive and optimistic.

We spent several days travelling around the area, seeing the work of the schools, anti-FGM campaigners and micro-finance groups, all of which was immensely impressive and deeply moving. At the end of a week, we were waved off by the community in the same way that we had been greeted, with a typically dazzling display of warmth and hospitality, and a farewell performance of singing and dancing. It had been intense but wonderful and we left the community bearing gifts and very powerful memories. It had been arranged long in advance that, after seeing the work of the charity, and contributing to it by our visit, we would spend another few days on safari, seeing the wildlife of Kenya.

We arrived at Sweetwaters Serena Camp on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a massive safari park and wildlife preserve, after a long and dusty drive along the Meru-Nairobi Highway. The camp itself was essentially an open-air hotel with large tents instead of rooms, arranged around an old colonial farm building. The drive itself was fascinating, with the dry and dusty roads around Kajuki gradually giving way to lush verdant meadows, north of Mount Kenya. Watching as it slipped past, I was reminded strangely of driving through Somerset in England, although on a somewhat grander scale. Further on, there were the vast greenhouses beside the road that provide other countries with cut flowers and out of season vegetables, and we mulled over the pros and cons of a poor country that can struggle to feed its people using precious water and resources to grow food for others.

The Camp felt like an alien world; geographically close to the people we had spent time with, but it was an international and luxurious hotel that felt a million miles away. Around us were holiday-makers from all over the world, for whom this would, by and large, be their only experience of the country, and as we regrouped at breakfast and dinner, eating well cooked international cuisine, I could see that most of my group were equally dazed by the contrast with where we had just come from. Its very easy to sound po-faced about insensitive tourists, and I wouldn't want to pretend to have been much more than that myself, but it was hard not to feel that it was unjust, such abundance so close to people who had become friends, and who, in contrast, had so little.

We were here to see the animals, though, and as we were driven out into the Conservancy, it was hard not to get caught up in the search for wildlife. The first drive was a little underwhelming, only seeing an elephant at some distance, and then a herd of zebra. Later, when we went out again, we saw giraffes, and then, trundling slowly down a dusty side track, came almost literally face to face with the glorious lioness shown above. We were standing up in the safari truck, and she felt close enough to touch. There's something intangibly thrilling about making eye contact with such a powerful wild animal, and after taking a few pictures, I just watched her as she watched us. I found myself narrowing my eyes at her, an instinctive greeting towards cats, and felt, just for a moment, that we understood each other.

Aroumd and about

The sound of four grown men being assailed with buckets of water in a vaulted hammam reminded me of the noises made by crowds attending fireworks displays, in my childhood. As we lined up against the wall, we were pelted with water of varying temperatures, each of which drew from us different noises, ranging from comfort to pain: warm water ("oooh"), hot ("aaah") and occasionally very cold ("eeeee"). After a while, these sounds, which echoed around the tiled rooms, began to make us all laugh in a slightly delirious way, to the undoubted bewilderment of the hammam's attendant and his assistant.

The day before, we had descended from the refuge just below Toubkal in the Atlas Mountains, the highest peak in North Africa, and we were sorely in need of hygiene. It was in the depths of February, the mountain was encrusted in snow and ice, and the temperature inside the refuge where we had spent a few nights was, but for one room with a stove, extremely cold. One morning, I had braved the dribbling pipe in the basement room that was pleased to call itself a "shower", but as I squatted in the shower tray, desperately hoping for the barest hint of warmth, I had started to doubt whether I would ever get properly warm again.

The summit of Toubkal had been reached a few days before that, and not without with a great deal of effort. Altitude, combined with occasionally knee-deep snow, meant that our ascent had been far from speedy. At the top, we looked out across the Atlas Mountains, under a crips blue sky; the covering of snow making it extremely hard to judge scale.

"Are we the slowest group you've lead up here?" somebody asked, jokingly, but our guide's polite smile and silence in reply spoke volumes.

Back down the valley, we had walked across to Amound, a small village clustered on top of an ancient mountain land-slip, on the promise of a traditional massage and steam room. The village resembled a scattered collection of cardboard boxes, and appeared extremely basic. Inside the hammam, however, all was warm and clean. Afterwards, we marched back across the valley to our auberge, skin tingling with freshness.

Neighbours in need

We walked from the road, following the little girl along indistinct dusty paths through the brush, to her home, in a remote sun-parched area of rural Kenya. Her mother sat within a small enclosure, its boundaries marked by a low hedge of thorns, with the girl's three brothers. Nearby, a goat nuzzled at the family's dishes and plates, stacked in a roughly woven basket. When she saw her family, the little girl ran ahead of us, and I watched as she shared the cereal bar I had given her with her eldest brother.

Her mother sat demurely, as her daughter ran up, and it took me a moment to realise that this was partly because of her disabled feet, which faced in the wrong directions. I felt awkward to have turned up, like this, and could sense her embarrassment, as she readjusted her brown skirt about her ankles, to better hide her feet.

In the glare of the sun, the family's home seemed painfully modest and fragile. A thatched mud hut, through whose walls the wooden framework showed, here and there; a tangle of fabric the only door. As the leader of our group sat with the mother, and played with her children, Mrs Tom, a local community leader, invited me to enter the house. I had come along to help record the work of the charity that was supporting this family, and the school that the little girl attended, but I still felt that I was intruding on these people's lives. The mother gently encouraged me to go in, and I followed Mrs Tom through the doorway, into the dark room.

It was just one room, perhaps a third the size of my far from grand living room at home, and it was thick with a fug of smoke from the fire that burned in one corner. Above the gently smoking embers hung a small cooking pot containing stewing beans. To one side of the tiny cramped space stood the parents' bed, a makeshift curtain of clothes the only dividing wall between their space and the other large bed, where their four children slept. As my eyes adjusted to the murk and darkness - there were no windows - I began to make out the objects that were stuck into the eaves of the wall; old porridge stirrers, arrows, a kettle, a machete.

We had been in the community for about a week, and had seen the mothers walking their children to school, but this was the first time I had got so close to a family, and their normal lives. For all the expectations that I might have had of culture shock, visiting this remote, rural and desperately poor community, the thing that had struck me the most was how fundamentally alike we were. It should not have been a surprise; that these people were perfectly normal people, with whom I had a great deal in common, but we are conditioned, sometimes despite ourselves, to think of people as very alien because they live in a different place, or in a different way.

As I took in the tiny space inside this family's home, however, I could feel something welling inside me; in clumsy terms, I suppose it was a sense of injustice at the fact that these people were living in such basic conditions, in genuine hardship. Combined with this was a terrible sense of impotence at the scale of their poverty and at the odds that were so cruelly stacked against them. Back outside, I did my best to engage positively with the children, but I was aware of my own quietness, as I struggled to assimilate the experience. Finally, we handed out toys for the children, said our goodbyes and walked back along the sandy track towards the road. As we did so, it took me by surprise to realise that I was crying, despite myself.

There is so much to be done, in this world, that it can feel like an impossible task to achieve anything. Things can be done to bring positive change, however. We just have to allow for the fact that a small change for the better is infinitely better than no change at all. Whilst, individually, we can only do so much, when we combine our forces, our good intentions, and our resources, the effect can be greater and more beneficial than we can sometimes imagine.

www.stpeterslifeline.org.uk/

Don't look down

All being well, you reach the edge of the crater at the top of Kilimanjaro just as dawn starts to break. Far far to the east, a speck of light appears, grows and turns into a sliver of sun, which gradually divides the sky and the Earth. For six hours or so, starting from around midnight, you have been walking steadily, unceasingly, in the cold and dark. Around you, all you have been able to see is the pools of light cast by your and your companions’ head torches, as you trudge up the scree slopes of the mountainside.

The last night of ascending Kilimanjaro is an intensely surreal experience, like being trapped inside a dream. Without visible landmarks, it is like walking endlessly in the dark, along the same stretch of dusty path. The cold is colder than you can remember ever experiencing before; a dry chill that nips at your exposed skin, and tries to seep through your clothes. Water bottles freeze and toes feel as if they are doing likewise. The final climb – the last ascent after days of walking – is long, slow, relentless.

Most of us had been here before, four years previously, but had not made it to the top. A combination of a quicker route than this one (and thus less acclimatisation to the altitude), an oversleeping guide (which led to a panicked late departure from camp), and a stop-start-stop-start ascent did for the group, and only one of us had reached even the crater rim. The sense of unfinished business had burned in us all ever since, and now we had the chance to finish what had been left incomplete.

Kilimanjaro is not the most dangerous mountain in the world, nor are most of its routes especially adventurous or arduous ascents, but it is still a tough climb for most normal people. As we reached the lip of the crater, three of our group had already had to pull out, owing to illness, and another one of our team only just made it, a chest infection becoming increasingly evident in the final stages of the climb.

The rest of us were there, though. We had made it. As I looked out across the cloud-covered landscape, with the delightfully warming sun rising and spreading its light, I was overwhelmed. What had, for several years, felt like a tantalising impossibility, had now become a reality. With teary eyes, which I was too tired to wipe, I watched the world spread out beneath us, with the curve of the Earth marking the horizon.

“Go for the top?” somebody said.

“Yes. Definitely.”