Beauty of Western Kenya Masks Problems

NAIROBI, Kenya _ Stepping off the plane in western Kenya last week, I immediately felt like I’d entered a different country. The breeze off of nearby Lake Victoria was warm, the greeting from Paul, a local journalist who met me at the airport, even warmer. “How does it feel to be out of Nairobi?” Paul asked, smiling.

To a Westerner, the pace of work and life in Nairobi, with its endless tea breaks and your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine deadlines, can often be maddening. But to Kenyans outside Nairobi, their capital is a frenzied and chaotic place where life moves way too fast. Paul, who often makes the 45-minute flight from the lake region to the big city, shuddered visibly when we talked about the Nairobi traffic.

I was at Lake Victoria to do a story on the environmental problems facing one of East Africa’s most important natural resources. It was my first visit to the region and I was struck by the greenness of the landscape and the wide blue expanse of the lake, whose shore was dotted with dozens of small fishing villages that whizzed by as we traveled south down a smooth tarmac road. Guys sold fresh sugarcane off the backs of their bikes; ladies peddling fish by the lakeshore smiled and offered me their “local price.”

But the natural beauty masks real problems. Like so much of eastern Africa, the lake region is suffering from overpopulation and environmental degradation. The lake basin, which covers five countries, is now home to some 30 million people in an area about the size of Washington state (which has a population of 6 million). Despite the riches of the lake, most people live below the poverty line, which here means they survive on less than $1 a day.

The pressures on land are increasing, farmers told me in village after village. People are cultivating on seemingly every available inch, right up to the water’s edge. Fish that used to be so plentiful just don’t seem to come around as much anymore. In the town of Mbita, Evelyn and I listened as a group of fishermen rattled off statistics like it was a presidential debate, arguing that overfishing was destroying the lake. “There is too much competition in the lake,” Charles Anudo said. “If this continues the lake might be finished.”

As we drove into the town of Homa Bay one afternoon, Paul leaned toward me and intoned: “This is the No. 1 place for HIV in Kenya.” Not a line from the tourism board, but it’s a well-known fact in Kenya. The epidemic rages here due to environmental and cultural factors that don’t exist elsewhere in the country.

The dominant tribe, the Luo, don’t practice male circumcision, which researchers believe helps to reduce HIV transmission. And in the hand-to-mouth fishing economy, the few dollars that people do make in the daytime tend to get spent at night in bars and brothels, helping the virus to spread even faster.

The picture isn’t totally bleak. There’s a network of strong local civil society groups that are advocating for improved environmental practices and that have funding and support from the Kenyan government and international donors. The area is a hotbed of research by U.S. and other scientists into HIV and malaria, and recent findings on the link between circumcision and HIV transmission is reducing the negative stigma associated with the practice, which could put a dent in the AIDS problem, as Craig Timberg of the Washington Post reported recently.

Everywhere we looked in Homa Bay there were signs for “VCT” _ voluntary counseling and testing for HIV. These have sprung up all over Kenya in recent years, promoting knowledge of the virus. Paul also pointed out a couple of new buildings in town _ locally owned banks, still a rarity in this underdeveloped swath of western Kenya, but a sign that people now have someplace safer to keep their money.

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Shashank Bengali covers Africa for McClatchy Newspapers. E-mail him at sbengali@mcclatchydc.com.

To read more of this writer’s blog _ as well as those of other McClatchy foreign correspondents _ go to http://news.mcclatchy.com/

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(c) 2007, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

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