"Sing a song of promise..."

The long dirt track back to Torbi was perfect for a few stoic images of women walking alone in such a vast landscape and so I gathered this ad hoc group together and started to walk with them back to town. Again, working the scenes in front of me, trying very hard not to slow their pace as they were now under a heavy load. However, I found it refreshing that they still had the energy to have a laugh with one another about God only knows what although I assumed that much of it was at my expense, on second thought...I know it was at my expense.

Staying close together they slowly began to sing what could only be a work song with their newly added extra weight swinging back and forth across their backs like pack animals. Their rough hands bleeding at the knuckles from hard contact with unyielding wood…their dark brown skin freshly scratched and etched from wrist to shoulder all the while holding onto rope and the odd yellow plastic container which holds a small measure of cocoa brown colored water to drink on their way back to town. Yet through all of this they sing loud and pure of heart with little indication that they’re hurt or even feel pain anymore. All such emotion is lost in the abyss of communal toil where phrases such as “All for One and One for All” prove to be just lost western words in some movie somewhere.

In this desert wasteland, admittedly home to many of Kenya's proudest nomadic tribes...you'd find little comfort in the pain they feel each and every day from not having enough food to eat or water wells that have run dry. And if the relentless suffering from the elements isn't enough for you then the threat of getting caught in the crossfire of tribal blood feuds - the unending quest for revenge, surely must be. So the sorrows of life come fast, thrown at these desert dwellers by an unfair world and yet maybe the songs sung by the women this day contain wisps of hope that maybe together…together…if only for just one moment we can get through anything...if we just stick together.