Displaced #6 – Kenya
Evocative stories of people who have to leave their homes due to climate change.
Here, with some delay, is our next newsletter.
After the Philippines as our first destination in 2025, we continued straight away with Kenya, the trip that we had to postpone due to Monika’s accident. The original plan was to work in Kenya and Ethiopia. However, discussions with the IOM revealed that the situation in Ethiopia is currently very unstable and that it would have been difficult to work there as planned. We therefore decided to focus on Kenya.
As funding with the help of foundations is still proving to be very complicated and we have not received any support from this side to this point, it is becoming apparent that it will be a considerable challenge to finance our project in full and as planned.
Although this will lead to certain restrictions, the trips so far have been so productive and we have met such exciting people with incredible stories that this should hardly lead to any loss of quality.
It is with great enthusiasm that we will be embarking on further journeys over the next few months to tell the stories of people who are already directly affected by climate change.
Mathias & Monika
BRASCHLER/FISCHER
+41 79 205 0330
visualimpactprojects.org
CH40 8080 8009 0719 6376 6
Hellgasse 4 – 5103 Wildegg
The two very short days at home after our trip to the Philippines were just enough to back up all the data, do our laundry and make sure that someone was still looking after our cat Miara.
After a bumpy flight with Ethiopian, which turned out not to be our favorite airline, we arrived in Nairobi. However, our arrival in Kenya was not without challenges. Like many other countries, Kenya also poses restrictions when it comes to the use of drones. The conditions for entering the country with drones and using them are so absurdly complicated that we decided to try entering the country with our drone without official authorization. But this attempt ended quite quickly at the Kenyan customs. As all luggage is scanned on entry, our drone was immediately recognized and confiscated, with the note that we would get it back when we left the country.
After a short night in Nairobi, our journey continued with a small, local airline to the North of the country, to Turkana. Our destination was Kakuma, near the South Sudanese border, and home to one of the largest refugee camps in Africa. More than 300,000 refugees live in Kakuma, some of whom have been there for a long time. While many of these people have been forced to flee due to conflict, there are a significant number of refugees whose fate is linked to climate change.
The effects of climate change are also being felt by the people of the Turkana tribe, who live in Northern Kenya and are nomadic herders. Droughts, which have intensified due to climatic changes, have led to the Turkanas losing a very large number of their animals in recent years. As the animals were their main possession, this led to an existential crisis for many Turkana people. Nakwani, a pastoralist we portrayed, told us that a few years ago he owned dozens of camels and 300 goats. Today he only owns 17 goats. He was once considered very wealthy, but due to the drought he lost almost all his possessions.
As the situation is not expected to improve, the UN and various NGOs have launched a program to help the pastoralist Turkana people become sedentary farmers. In a very short time, the Turkana have taken a step towards sedentarization that has taken centuries in other regions. Despite the difficult situation in which the Turkana find themselves, we experienced them as a proud, but above all very warm and cheerful people.
After 4 days in the dry heat of Northern Kenya, we made our way to the South of the country, where we were greeted by a humid, heavy heat. While the problem in the North is that there is often too little water, the signs in the South are exactly the opposite. The Tana River repeatedly overflows its banks and, with the increase in heavy rainfall, this leads to ever greater flooding.
In the fall of 2023, particularly extensive flooding occurred in the southern part of the Tana River, destroying entire villages and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. Even 15 months after the floods of the Tana River destroyed the homes of countless people, a huge number of them are still living in temporary IDP camps set up along the highway from Malindi to Garissa. With the IOM we visited one of these IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps near Garsen and met entire families living in makeshift tents erected with the help of branches and tarpaulins donated by aid organizations. The humid heat in the camp was unbearable and it got so hot in the tents during the day that it was almost impossible to stay inside.
The people in these IDP camps do not dare to return to their former villages because they are justifiably afraid of the next big flood. The government promises them that they will get new land, but this will take a long time. And so the people have no choice but to endure the most difficult conditions in these camps in the hope that their situation will improve one day.
In the South of Kenya we experienced a novelty after all the many journeys in the last 25 years all over the world: We were accompanied by a personal protection force consisting of 4 armed policemen. We would have liked to have done without it, but the IOM made it clear to us that there was no alternative in the area in which we were working, as the Islamist militia Al Shabab was active in the region.
When we left Kenya, we actually got our drone back. However, the customs officer couldn’t find it at first, so he quickly took Mathias into the room with the confiscated drones to help him find it. Mathias was quite astonished when he was led to a shelf containing dozens of confiscated drones. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who had the idea of sneaking a drone into the country.
