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It began like
any other morning at Sigor High School. As a gentle breeze flowed
down the hillside campus toward the vast, acacia-speckled valley
below, charcoal stoves began to fire, roosters crowed, and an accelerated,
6:00 a.m. sunrise abruptly dissolved the cold quiescence of rural
African night.
Rising
from bed in my small stone house, and from under the suspended mesh
netting that supposedly made me impervious to the wrath of the deadly
malaria virus, I pumped, through my trusty purifier, a Nalgene bottle
full of Sigor's finest H2O — collected the day before from
a small frog pond just across the road from school. After gathering
a pack of belongings for my upcoming day of travels, I paid a quick
visit to my familiar outhouse, making sure to greet the small lizard
that, for as long as I had known, had made his home there, and hadn't
once complained about my making use of his abode for the purpose
of emptying my bowels.
Just
down the hill from my dwelling, Philemon Terer went about a similar
routine. After a typical night of bunking in one of Sigor's wooden,
barrack-style dorms (each filled wall-to-wall with more than 75
students), Philemon — sporting a pair of Asics trainers and
a mesh In-Sport running top I'd given him after our first day of
practice — completed his morning business and made his way
to the school's front gate.
In
the month since I'd arrived in Sigor, Philemon, the reigning four-time
Bomet District cross country champion, had become quite possibly
my best friend within an 8,000-mile radius. A 5'7, 110-pound breed
of confidence, amiability and an almost childlike naiveté,
the 18 year-old high school senior (or 19 year-old, as in Kenya,
no one ever seemed to be quite sure of one's age) had guided myself
and other students on training runs nearly every afternoon, and
had even accompanied me on a weekend retreat to Kericho, the nearest
large town.
On
this particular morning in October, the two of us were traveling
again. In a long-anticipated visit, Philemon was bringing me home.
A
home, in the neighboring village of Olbutyo, located just 10 kilometers
to the west of Sigor High School. It was a distance we expected
to cover on foot until soon after our departure from the gate, when
a distant rumbling gradually brought forth a large flatbed truck.
Hopping onto the vehicle's bed, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded
by milk, our rig stopping roughly every quarter mile as area farmers
waited roadside to dispense, into a series of large aluminum vats,
their livestock's fresh maziwa. Philemon and I, doing our best to
help the cause, took turns dumping the milk, first weighed by the
vehicle's conductor, into the cylindrical, polished containers.
All
was well until Philemon, far from the epitome of grace, narrowly
avoided spilling a large carafe of milk all over the ground. Forced
to hold my breath, I imagined him, like many an American long-distance
star, an ungainly child, struggling with more traditional games,
like soccer, field hockey, badminton, and basketball. Hand-eye coordination
yielding to foot speed, he'd eventually taken up running, starting
a new career — one that had already brought him, among countless
other credentials, a sixth place finish in the 10,000 meters at
the Rift Valley Provincial Championships. With the vast majority
of Kenya's top athletes situated in the Rift Valley Province, that
is essentially akin to a sixth place finish in all of Kenya.
Accustomed
to traveling by means of matatu — canopied vehicles designed
to seat eight, or, from my experience, up to 27 — Philemon
and I said goodbye to a taste of comparatively luxurious travel
as our milk-wagon finally lumbered into Olbutyo market.
With
an ethos similar to that of a 19th century American two-horse town,
Olbutyo is much like any rural Kenyan center. Flanked on all sides
by a picturesque chain of undulating hills — many tilled and
cultivated due to a shortage of flat arable land — the market
itself is little more than a small assemblage of wooden clapboard
shops and a handful of unfinished concrete structures that appear
to have been beset by a round of heavy artillery fire. Located about
30K south of Kenya's tea country, Olbutyo is part of an area that
was viewed as an agricultural pariah by the British colonial government,
which held power until Kenya's independence in 1963. As a result,
it still has yet to see the arrival of many modern amenities that
are common throughout other areas of the country. If powered at
all, the market's assemblage of butcheries, cafés, and general
stores are at the mercy of a diesel generator. Most, however, close
at dusk or stay open in the evening by flame.
Situated
roughly 40K from the famed Maasai Mara game reserve, where lavish
dinner buffets and tented camps are worlds away from the rural Africa
that surrounds them, Olbutyo is one of the southern-most communities
of the Kipsigis people, one of a handful of tribes considered part
of a greater ethnic community known as the Kalenjin. Scattered throughout
much of the Rift Valley Province, the Kalenjin, at a size of just
over 3,000,000 (roughly 10% of Kenya's population) is the tribe
of nearly all of the nation's international athletic stars. So dominant
on the world stage are the Kalenjin that Kenyan running guru John
Manners estimated in 1997 that over the previous 10 years, the tribe
had won close to "Forty percent of all the biggest international
honors available in men's distance running… the greatest geographical
concentration of achievement," he puts it, "in the annals
of sport."1
The
reasons behind this amazing fact are often the subject of controversy,
though it doesn't take a physiology expert to see that Kalenjin
success is largely due to genetics. Historically a cattle rearing
people, the Kalenjin have evolved to be lean, compact, and replete
with slow twitch muscle fiber, in striking contrast to the average
individual of European descent (including your humble author), or
even those of many other tribes in Kenya. The Luo, for instance,
situated along the shores of Lake Victoria, are generally a much
bulkier people. More suited to events that call for strength and
quickness, Luo make up nearly all of the Harambee Stars, the Kenyan
national football team.
Still,
no Kalenjin to my knowledge has emerged from the womb with gold
medal in hand, which forces us to turn to an analysis of upbringing
and culture. Though the conventional narrative of the African boy
running a daily marathon-like distance to and from school is often
false, children who grow up in a society where walking is the primary
means of transportation, and who spend their days playing outside
rather than sitting in front of a computer or a TV, are, beyond
any doubt, more likely to develop into successful athletes than
their comparatively sloth-like Western counterparts. And once a
society has produced those successful athletes, others, seeking
similar accolades, are naturally going to attempt to follow in their
footsteps. Unlike the U.S., where any attempt at a post-collegiate
racing career is generally a financial sacrifice, Kalenjin youth
such as Philemon, having seen the comparative riches of those who
came before, view athletics as a roadmap to financial prosperity.
Of
course, coming up with a be-all, end-all explanation of Kalenjin
running dominance is about as difficult as trying to explain the
Kalenjin penchant for letting their milk rot and ferment before
drinking it (I nearly took a ride on the vomit express after my
run-in with this so-called delicacy). Not wanting to feign expertise,
I defer to Manners, whose paper "Kenya's Running Tribe,"
remains the best available literature on the subject.
Turning
back to my visit to Olbutyo, the concentration of local talent was
and is readily apparent. Though the region loses many of its top
athletes to other areas of the Rift Valley Province, as they typically
prefer to train at higher elevation in places such as the North
Rift running stronghold of Iten, there is far from a dearth of locals
who've made it big time. Area residents with top-notch credentials
include international mainstays William and Cornelius Chirchir and
2004 Olympian John Cheruiyot Korir, all of whom, as Philemon would
habitually point out to me, seemed to live "just over those
hillsides." Even the first man we greeted, after stepping off
our milk truck into the market, a short and affable veterinarian
named Bernard Lagat (not to be confused, as he made sure to point
out, with The Bernard Lagat) had run 1,500 meters in 3:47.
Then,
of course, there was Philemon, at whose home we finally arrived.
Greeted
by swarms of unkempt, yet jovial children, some unable to contain
their curiosity and refrain from poking at the exotic, pasty skin
of the mzungu, we descended upon the Terer family compound. Spread
over multiple acres, with mud huts, fields of maize, and scurrying
chickens visually alloyed into a most idyllic rural estate, the
family land seemed, rightly so, a source of patriarchal honor.
Summoned
into the central hut by Philemon's father, with whom I tried out
my best "Chamge's" and "Kongui Mising's" (Hello
and Thank You in the local Kipsigis language) we were soon served
up a carefully prepared late morning dinner. Consisting of generous
rations of stewed beef, heaping plates of rice, and washed down,
as always, with bottomless mugs of tea, it proved to more than satisfy
my palate. Sharing the meal with various adult men — including
uncles, neighbors, and friends — I was somewhat disturbed by
the lack of female attendance. The women, as I would learn, though
creators of our feast, were required by custom to eat apart from
the male members of the family. Even the swarms of children —
some cousins, others neighbors, still others seeming to have materialized
out of thin air — were permitted inside the hut during our
meal while the women were not. Still, the children were not served
any food.
Feeling
guilty about my own gluttony — though I could do little else
but graciously accept each successive serving of rice and meat,
usually piled high on my plate when I'd made it about half way through
the previous ration — I finally risked mild impoliteness, and
handed what I was hard-pressed to finish over to the kids. Devoured
almost instantaneously, leaving none available for those who exhibited
the slightest bit of hesitation, I realized at that moment, despite
the pleasant nature of their natural surroundings, that these children
were almost unquestionably underfed. Philemon, I imagined, was also
once forced to go hungry. Perhaps, someday, through his running,
the future youngsters of his family would be able to chow down with
the rest of us.
My
own plate clear, I spent the remainder of the afternoon touring
the local area — which included a stop for a spoonful of fresh
honey at the home of Philemon's uncle, Langat. As the sun began
to sink toward the horizon, we said our exaggerated goodbyes, communicating
in a curious mix of the local Kipsigis and the national languages
of English and Kiswahili. With not a milk truck in sight, Philemon
and I began our trek back to Sigor, but not until after a short
detour to the local watering hole, where I treated the hometown
track star and his uncle each to a bottle of Tusker, Kenya's finest
brew. Wary of the taste at first, Philemon, who'd apparently never
had a drink before, was upon completion, begging me for another.
"Careful,
bwana," I discouraged him, using the East African slang for
"dude" as it might translate. "I want you to make
it back to school."
1.
Manners, John. Kenya's
Running Tribe.
(Posted
November 16, 2005)
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