Wild life | 21 March 2013

Rift Valley

‘We’re on the frontline,’ I said. ‘And however many guns we had, it wouldn’t be enough against the cattle rustlers.’ ‘Yes,’ replied my friend Jamie, a shareholder in our farm. ‘You’re low-hanging fruit.’ I showed him the bullet holes riddling my Land Cruiser, and told him again about the ambush, the raids, how farm manager Celestina was having a nervous collapse, how the police never came to our rescue. ‘Jamie, we might have to give up the cattle,’ I said. ‘It will break my heart — this is what I had instead of a mistress to get me through middle age.’ ‘Aidan,’ he said, ‘they’re cows.’ On the drive out, I figured if I lose cows it’s no big deal. But what if you lose it all? I wondered how far a man goes before he admits defeat and runs — and what the consequences are. And almost immediately, in the Rift Valley, I learned the story of six brothers and sisters I met while filming a documentary back at the Restart Centre, the orphanage I wrote about before Christmas. The children are Jane, 15, John, 12, Elijah, 11, Pilot (9 and so named because he wants to fly a helicopter), Mary, 8, and Elizabeth, who’s 6. They arrived at the orphanage rootless, without a past except for vaguely told horror stories. Their mother has vanished; their father, I heard, was a monster, who had attempted to sell his eldest daughter like a slave for £15 before he died of Aids. The TV producer Wael and I asked, ‘But where did they come from?’ All people knew was that before the vanished mother and the monstrous father, they had fled a place called Kuresoi during a spate of killings in Kenya’s last elections. The orphanage staff wanted to find out more and Wael and I agreed to tag along for the matatu taxi ride up the Rift Valley.