First you negotiate the military checkpoint where a gaggle of bored Kenyan soldiers lounge with their worn Armalite rifles screening vehicles entering Nairobi’s diminutive Wilson Airport. The hotel itself consists of a clubhouse, a series of bungalows and swimming pool with a suspicious oily iridescent sheen. The rooms, decorated in style best described a faux 20^th century penal institution, feature bare concrete floors, an iron frame bed and barred windows without screens. Mosquito netting canopies drape over the beds and mosquito coils grace the desk. Green skinned lizards climb the cistern above the toilet. Yet, to even get a room, you have to book well in advance.

I think this is because of the ghosts. At least that’s why I always spend my first night in Kenya in the club.

The next day, Eric and I headed to the Rift Valley to find where the clashes started. We met up with Peter Njorege, who had a combi, a small four-wheel drive van. What the vehicle lacked in charm, which was lot, it made up in mulish stamina.

We sped north along the valley’s north-south highway, passing towns of single story cinderblock buildings and two- and three-acre shambas, or small farms. The climate is so benign and the volcanic soil so rich, the farmers can coax two harvests a year. But two acres is two acres. It’s not much of a living.

We also see tent cities perched here or there, the temporary camps set up for the IDPs, or Internally Displaced Persons. In less bureaucratic language, these are people who ran for their lives. By some estimates, 600,000 Kenyans fled their homes. Some camps are for Kikuyus, others for Kalenjins. Everyone assures you the situation is peaceful, but none of the camps are mixed.

We pull off at the village of Casino and bounce our way along a badly rutted track. The combi bottoms out in a pothole and the gearbox starts to shriek in low gear as we top the crest of a hill and see the Baraka IDP camp, a small huddle of ragged tents. At one end of the field, far from where the tents are pitched is a large rubbish pit.

The Baraka IDP Camp

When the three of us spill out of the combi, dozens of camp children run to surround us. They just stand there looking up in wonder as if we have just fallen out of the sky, which is pretty much the size of it.

Samuel Maina Wahiu introduces himself as the camp’s “chairman.” He is a slightly built man not much taller than five-foot-four. When he smiles, you can see ridges of brown stain on his teeth indicating a childhood marred by hunger.

When I ask about the fighting, he’s not terribly interested in the question. He has other worries, all of which revolve around the future. The Kenyan government doesn't provide much help, and the Red Cross has pulled out of the Rift Valley IDP camps. With so many IDPs looking for work, casual labor jobs are scarce and the pay is low. Even getting water is hard. The dry season sun has shriveled the closest river. A more distant one that is still flowing is polluted.

It doesn't take much to know the dozens of children around us will likely grow up to be not much taller than Samuel. And their teeth will be scarred also. Eventually, we steer the conversation back to how the fighting started.

“I think the Kalenjins were ready to fight because their leaders prepared them for war,” Samuel said. “We were not.”

There's more than anecdotal evidence like this to back up the charge. While the run up to the elections were peaceful, shops up and down the Rift Valley reported a surge in sales of pangas, hoes and sickles. For a time, you couldn't even find machetes to buy, and one politician was stopped by police with a trunk carrying more than 60 pangas. In retrospect, it's obvious the killings were orchestrated.

But at the time, the start of the fighting took most people by surprise. Samuel said he heard the news of the results on the radio, and the next thing he knew, two large gangs of young Kalenjin men stormed his village. The raiders beat anyone who opposed them, looted the houses, and drove off the livestock. They even wrenched the metal window frames from the walls and stripped the roofs of corrugated iron sheets. They burned what they couldn’t take.

 Samuel insists there is no trouble right now but when pressed on the matter, he points out that all the villages neighboring Baraka are controlled by Kikuyus, hardly an endorsement of trust. As for whether the fighting could erupt in the future, he shrugs his shoulders. “Who knows?”

***

 After hitting the pothole, the combi trails a cloud of black smoke behind it as it labors up the rolling hills into the heart of the farming country. At Baraka, we had picked up Francis Kisiaruki, a soft spoken man who has offered to show us where the fighting took place. As we pass one abandoned shamba after another, he tells us who used to live there. While the charred skeletons of the houses remain, the fields are freshly plowed. Have the farmers returned? Francis shakes his head. The Kalenjin have simply appropriated their neighbors’ fields.

Francis tells Peter to pull over near burnt out planks that jut up from the earth. Next to it, I can see the foundations of a small hut. As we walk among what had been walls, the wind tosses the wildflowers that have sprung up inside. Francis explains this had been a Roman Catholic church, but the church leaders split along ethnic lines until one night a group of armed men appeared. They gang raped the woman who lived in the hut and was the church’s caretaker before they burned the church to the ground.

Reflecting the chaos of the time, Francis doesn’t even know if the gang was made up of Kalenjins or Kikuyus or even some other group. Perhaps it’s not important because the message being sent was clear: Nothing is sacred.

Francis stands amid what’s left of his Roman Catholic church.

“Can you believe it?” Francis asks. “We had just rebuilt the church in 2003, and they start arguing. Then the church is burned, and now we have nothing. Not even God.”

***

 We head towards Total Junction, a town that sprouted like a weed in recent years. Francis leads me along row after row of destroyed buildings. The place looks like it’s been bombed.

The fighting lasted for days here, Francis explains, and by the end, even the police force had split with Kikuyu officers shooting at Kalenjin officers. A gasoline station at the cross roads ensured both sides had plenty of gas for Molotov cocktails. Who ultimately won isn’t clear. The town is almost completely abandoned.

What's left of Total Junction.

“I am very sad,” Eric remarks as we walk amid the wreckage. “When we first came here, I remembered how it was before the clashes. This was a vibrant town. And now…” He gestures with one hand at the scene around us suddenly at a loss for words.

We head back towards Nakuru to get the ailing combi to a friend of Peter’s brother, Kefa, who says he can fix it.

 ***

 In the cool of the evening, we sit in the bar of the Hotel Kunste. I’m having a tough time figuring out how the gangs of men could appear at night and then melt away during the day. Where did they come from? Who were they? Where did they go? Peter shoots a look at Kefa. Then Kefa explains.

Outside of Nakuru, lies the Menengai Crater, a vast caldera of a dormant volcano. Cave openings dot the outside of the crater wall, and one of them served as a hideout for a Kikuyu militia which launched revenge attacks in Nakuru. The next day, we take the combi, which after its repairs sounds marginally better, up to the top of the wall and head down through a series of forest logging roads to a large pit.

During the clashes, Kikuyu militia made this into a stronghold. The sacred fig is to the left.

Clambering down the sides, we come across the opening to a volcanic vent that is dominated by a strangling fig tree. The Kikuyus regard the fig as a holy tree because its seeds lodge in the branches of a host tree and send runners down to earth. The Kikuyu say the tree grows down from heaven.

Looking out from inside the cave. The blue atmosphere is caused by the smoke from the fire to the right. You can see the outline of two Kikuyus praying. Two other Kikuyus stand in the entrance, keeping an eye on our party.

Today, the path way around the inside of the pit is lined with Kikuyu men and women who have come to fast and pray. They sit and lie under rough shelters of plastic sheeting, lost in meditation, much as their ancestors would have been when they worshipped Ngai, the Kikuyu god who lived on Mount Kenya. Only now, the Kikuyu pray to Jesus. During the clashes, the militia would emerge at dark to set up roadblocks, the same ones Eric flew over. I'm not sure if the militia bothered to pray, but I bet their victims did, if they had the chance.

So far, we’d managed to find some answers to who and how, but the big question of why remained. Over drinks, Eric leans forward and taps the table with his index finger.

“This is all because of Kenyatta. He started this, and he knew he was playing with fire, but he did it anyway.”

This is the first time I have ever heard a Kenyan disparage Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president and something of a secular saint in the nation’s collective mythology. But Eric is right. Kenyatta played fast and loose with ethnic rivalries by making sure his own Kikuyu people got first dibs on everything. One of the problems is, the system is set in stone, and now Kenya has 20 million more people than in Kenyatta’s time, and living standards have fallen below those seen in colonial times. In short, more people are fighting over less. And what's left is disappearing fast.

With the combi working, such as it is, we head south to Lake Naivasha. Unlike most of the Rift Valley lakes which are alkaline, Naivasha is a vast reservoir of drinking and irrigation water, but it is drying up. Exactly how fast surprises even Charles, a friend of Kefa’s whom we met up with. He takes us to a Kenya Wildlife Services park on the lake shores and guides us around the dense fever tree forest along the old water’s edge because Cape buffalo lurk in the shadows. Beyond this, we find a massive mud flat extending four hundred yards out before it meets the water.

“This all happened in just the last three months,” Charles says of the receding water. He has a birdlike face and thin arms. As he stands looking at the distant water, I almost expect him to bob his head back and forth. “This is not good, not good at all. No.” As we walk to the distant water, we tromp over brown, dried out bulbs and vines, the remains of great floating islands of water hyacinth that were stranded by the receding water.

Only small water channels remain of the old shoreline of Lake Naivasha. If the lake goes, millions go thirsty.

You can’t blame any one factor for Lake Naivasha’s demise. Instead, it’s a combination of overuse, environmental damage and, probably, climate change. As for water consumption, you don’t have to look farther than the dozens and dozens of two- and three- acre greenhouses along Naivasha’s shores. At some point, Naivasha's big operation farmers, largely foreigners, looked for a crop that loved a high elevation, nearly year round sunshine, and could tolerate cool nights. They stumbled on roses. The success of the Kenya rose business has been so phenomenal that virtually every cut rose sold in Europe now has an African pedigree. Every morning, you can see the big refrigerator trucks barreling down the Rift Valley highway heading for Jomo Kenyatta Airport where they are flown to the flower auction houses in Rotterdam.

One Naivasha's greenhouses

 But success has come with a cost that is clear when you walk along the endless rows of rose bushes in the stifling greenhouses. Each bush, which is planted in shredded coconut husks, has a small hose that constantly drips a combination of water, acid, fertilizer, pesticide and herbicides. If the bushes develop mites, the farmers fumigate the whole greenhouse. It doesn’t take a genius to know that these chemicals wind up somewhere. The safest bet is the water table and then the lake.

Ossarian farms pumping station, one of the reasons the lake is dying.

 Farming on an industrial level is demanding, and the opportunity for cutting corners in terms of safety and pollution are obvious. Rose farmers insist they run good operations. Some probably do. But my German friend told me that when she pointed out to one farmer that he was dumping chemicals directly into a stream that flowed into the lake, he responded, "Yeah, and I don't give a damn." Studies have shown that the levels of chemical residues linked to the farms such as herbicides, pesticides and nitrogen are rising in the lakes waters and in its fish, a major source of food.

A fisherman wades out to set his nets. Rising levels of chemicals are making their way up the food chain through the fish. Studies have shown that high levels of nitrates, a common part of fertilizer, in drinking water can stunt the mental development in children. 

About a hundred yards away are the hippos.

Despite the penchant for secrecy among some of the farmers, we decide the best thing to do is to tackle one of the biggest operations on the lake. That would be the Ossarian farms which employ 5,000 people. After much driving about, winding up locked out of a sumptious guesthouse in the heat, we manage to blunder into the farm's headquarters after we babble our way past security.

Inside a cool buildings of quarried stone with well dressed secretaries scurrying about, I tell one that I would like to talk to the general manager. The secretary isn't sure what to make of me. I might be a flower buyer from Europe, but all the ones she has seen don't dress in dirty olive green shorts and hiking boots. To be safe, she informs me the general manager is very busy. I tell her I will wait. She doesn't like this down to the tips of her pink painted fingernails, particularly because Eric, Kefa, Charles, and Peter are waiting with me. We are taking up a lot of room around her desk, and the five of us are probably consuming most of the available oxygen.

After a stand off, she says she will fetch the general manager, but she's no longer maintaining the Kenyan tradition of politeness. The manager comes out, looking puzzled. For one thing, the security guys at the gate should have never let us. He's also not really sure about me. I'm not a tourist, that much is clear. But what the hell am I doing in his headquarters? And that's his first question.

“I’m doing some research for a book based in part on the flower farms in Kenya and was wondering if I might take a tour of some of the farms you operate,” I ask.

Without pausing, he barks in a Zimbabwe accent, "There is no way you will ever set foot on our property.” He says the words “no way” so emphatically you want to write them in capitals and underline them. There's a bit of awkwardness. The man coughs and goes on for a bit in an apologetic tone with a few "you understands" thrown in and  a couple "just can't risk its" also. He blames the need to maintain “trade secrets.”

Ossarian’s home on the shores of Lake Naivasha.

 Maybe it’s the man’s blushing cheeks or maybe it’s his hemming and hawing, but I'm getting the idea he's a bad liar. Or maybe he isn't. Trade secrets can cover a lot of ground, including unsafe working practices and intentional releases of pollutants. Wouldn't want to risk that getting out. In a country where over half the people don’t have formal jobs, it would take a reckless worker to challenge his boss. Add to this a growing concern about the levels of serious illness on the farms. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a lot you might actually feel apologetic over.

One embarrassing point is that while globalization has lifted up the flower farming industry, it's left the workers in the dust earning a pittance. On the one farm we eventually manage to talk our way onto, the workers lived in wood shacks on the grounds, pretty much in the same way their grandfathers did during colonial days when the huts were called “labor lines.” The only thing that has changed for them is the politics, and the need for their political party to win to help lift them out of their poverty trap.

Where Ossarian’s workers live.

                                                                             ***

 But back to vanishing Lake Naivasha. While the spreading farms suck more and more water from the lake, less water flows in, and you can see one of the reasons if you stand on the shores of Lake Naivasha at night.

Up on the dark outline of the Mau escarpment, the Rift's western wall, small bright pin pricks of red glow where the forest fires burn, and the pin pricks stretch as far north and south as the eye can see. In the past, the Mau Forest acted as a sponge absorbing the heavy downpours during the rainy season and then releasing the water slowly into rivers that replenished Naivasha in the dry season. The importance of this cycle was so clear, colonial administrators decreed the Mau forest to be protected from all intrusion, a haven for elephant and buffalo.

But starting in the late 1980s, under the pressures of population growth, land hunger and political expediency, former President Daniel Arap Moi found it useful to reward his supporters by doling out parcels of forest land. It is one reason he stayed in power over 20 years. The squatters swarmed in and cleared the forest for their farms. Then they kept on clearing it for firewood, to widen their fields, and to sell the lumber. What was once unbroken swathe of trees is now a checker board of bare land and tiny farms.

If cutting the trees might result in even more poverty in the Rift Valley, there's no doubt it was worth it to Moi and his family. His son Philip controls a fortune reported to be worth about $550 million. But, of course, Philip must have been a bit slow because his brother Gideon has managed to get his sticky fingers on a total  $790 million. The old man's worth is literally off the charts. Kenyans who have tried to find out tend to wind up as car accident victims or get gunned down in "armed robberies." All I know for sure is we drove past one of Daniel Arap Moi's many farms and it measured seven kilometers by 11 kilometers. All this in a country where most people farm one or two acres, and the average annual wage is $480.

When politicians talk about corruption, they use the euphemism "It is our turn to eat." But even by Kenyan standards, Moi and his boys have held a gargutuan feast on the public coffers.

We decide to look into all this and the forest fires first hand by heading up the escarpment. Afte a few miles, we leave 21^st century farming behind and entering an area where people still do slash and burn in much the same way they did in the 11^th century. Once inside the forest,  the damage is everywhere. Extending back from the road for two hundred yards on either side are the fresh stumps where the large trees have been logged. Only small trees, about as big around as my calf, are left. We even pass three Kenyans armed with a chain saw who are slicing up a cedar into rough boards. The stump is at least four-feet across, the remains of a giant.

We stop by a clear cut, a jumble of wasted boughs blackened by fire. A local man sits on the side of the road, and when we ask him about the fire, he says he and others from his village set it just a week ago.Before, the buffalo were on the road at night, and the villages were afraid to walk. Now, with the new growth burned off, the buffalo have left. Sometimes it doesn't take a conspiracy, just some poorly thought out actions to bring a whole house of cards tumbling down. 

The ghost of the Mau Forest.

The partial repair of the combi is holding up so we feel confident about heading upwards again and begin to cross a series of river beds. But these river beds are completely dry and choked with grass when they ought to be flowing year round. It is proof the forest can no longer hold the water that falls during the short and long rains any longer. All along the Rift Valley's western escarpment, it's the same story. A decade ago, Lake Nakuru had 42 sources of water flowing into it. Now, it has two.

Lake Nakuru’s Flamingos.

And if it dries up, the flamingos which draw tourists from worldwide, will vanish. In Kenya, where one dollar out of  every four is based on tourism, this is a big deal.

Kenyans also blame global warming for their water woes, and everyone I talked to is convinced the rains are coming later in the season and last for a shorter period of time. This may be true, but it is also true that Kenya’s rains have always been a hit or miss affair. So far, hard evidence that there is a sustained shift in weather patterns seems skimpy, but that doesn’t offer much comfort when a lake is drying out and then a drought hits.

After Naivasha, we head back to Nakuru. The combi needs another round of repairs, and Kefa has put us in touch with John Kahiga, a Kenya Forest Ranger. John’s offered to take us into the Menengai Crater itself along a brand new road cut by KenGen, a state-owned geothermal company.

We pick up John along the side of the Nakuru highway after he lopes across the median with his ranger coat flapping. As we head to the crater by back roads, John talks little, and, frankly, looks pretty bored. We reach the crest of a low point in the crater wall. The caldera is 98 miles in circumference and we can’t even see the lava plug in the center we are heading towards. The combi crawls along until finally John tells us to stop by a tall hill.

“This is where KenGen is digging prospecting wells,” John announces. He leads us to the top of the plug and finds a grave-sized pit. John leans over the edge. “See, it is much hotter down at the bottom.”

We all dutifully stick our hands down and it is hotter – but only by about five degrees. Now, standing by a dirt hole in the middle of nowhere, I’m getting bored, too. I snap some pictures and take some notes.

KenGen’s geothermal plant in Hell’s Gate. They want to build another in Menengai Crater. The sound of the roaring steam is like a 747 taking off. The whole Rift Valley is lined with ghost volcanoes.

We’re slipping and sliding down the plug again when John freezes like a lion which has spotted an impala. I look in the direction he is staring and see a faint column of dirty gray smoke rising from behind a fold in the earth. Then he’s off, sprinting down the slope. By the time we catch up, John has cornered a man who looks scared to death. And no wonder. John is shouting at him and pushing him aggressively backwards. Around the man’s feet is a small bundle of clothes, some iron tools, a plastic jerry can and bags of food. When John snatches up the panga on the ground, I’m no longer bored. Now, I’m worried. John carries the man’s clothes to a cooking fire and dumps them on it. He pours gasoline from the jerry can on top, and as the fire roars, he throws in the man’s food bags. Then he chops big gashes in the man’s cooking pot and flattens it with the heel of his boot. Meanwhile, Kefa and Eric collect the man’s other tools, a mattock and a shovel. If I understood obscenities in Kikuyu, I’d probably know what John is saying when he starts digging into a mound of smoking earth.

At this point, Peter who has been standing next to me with his arms crossed, decides it’s time the mzungu knew what was going on.

“He,” Peter points to the pathetic looking man, “is making illegal charcoal. He’s not allowed to cut trees here.”

The charcoal burners sneak into the crater and pile up chopped down the trees and bush. They set the wood on fire and bury it. Deprived of almost all oxygen, the wood is carbonized into charcoal, the basic cooking fuel for rural Kenyans. The rangers have long since learned there is no point in fining the charcoal burners because they have no money. Instead, they burn whatever clothes and bags they find, wreck their pots, and confiscate their tools and charcoal. For impoverished Kenyans, this is a catastrophe. The man we’ve confronted is now weeping, the tears running down his charcoal grimy face.

John breaks open an illegal charcoal kiln.

John spends his life chasing these people out of the dwindling Menengai forest, but the Kenyan Forest Rangers are desperately short of money. During January and February, John patrolled the crater on foot for three weeks, camping out every night as the only way to do his job. But the charcoal burners watch him constantly. They use spotters with cell phones to track him. Now, he says, because we’ve given him a surprise ride into the heart of the crater, he’s able to catch this man.

If John weren’t so pissed off at the charcoal burner, he’d probably look happy. After loading the large, confiscated sack of charcoal and tools in the back, we start off again. Almost immediately, John is pounding on Peter’s shoulder yelling for him to stop. Another plume of gray smoke rises from a dip in the earth.

We pile out, five big guys trying to squeeze through the Combi’s sliding doors. It’s not dignified, but we burst free. We bust another charcoal burner.

By the third stop, we get it down to an art form. John leaps out first with his panga, and the four of us follow at a run. I’m holding up my camera trying to take pictures and not fall flat on my face. Eric shouts KiSwahili that we’ve got photos already, so don’t try anything. Peter and Kefa come up on the wings. Within seconds, we’ve got a poor bewildered man and his son surrounded. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but clearly his day has taken a turn for the worse.

As John stands over the cowering charcoal burner shouting, the machete held in a menacing fashion, I get a queasy feeling.

John berates an illegal charcoal burner while the man’s son watches. The large sack to the man’s right is filled with charcoal that will be confiscated.

“Maybe he doesn’t have a choice,” I say to Kefa. “Maybe he’s so poor he’s got to do this.” I say this expecting Kefa to agree.

Instead, Kefa wheels around and scowls.

“That’s nonsense,” Kefa snaps. “There is always a choice. You don’t have to burn our forests. Listen, this is Kenya. We have free schooling for every child. And what does he do? He trains his son to do this. To burn the forest.”

Kefa is building a head of steam, and I’m not sure when he’s going to slow down.

“There is always something else they could do besides burn the forest down,” Kefa goes one. “In ten years, there will be no forest here and all this area will be a desert. What then? Who will make a living then?”

Kefa and Eric start taking the man’s tools.

It’s hard to argue with zero sum logic, and besides, Kefa is right. The illegal charcoal burners are essentially selfish men who would sacrifice everyone’s future for a small gain today. But there is another nagging thought in the back of my mind. According to Michela Wrong, a journalist, government officials in charge of procurement stole the eye popping figure of $6.4 billion from Kenya’s Treasury during the first half of the 1990s. Since then, the corruption has just gotten worse.

Right now, a forest ranger who doesn’t have the funding he needs to do a proper job of patrolling is yelling at a man who has no job prospect at all. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to see the problem isn’t with John or the charcoal burner but with Kenya’s political leaders. But when all those millions are at stake, it’s easy to see why winning is so important, you’d kill to do so.

Swarming the fourth charcoal burner.

The raids go on. By the sixth raid, we surround an old man who is blind in one eye, but nobody has the spirit to go on with it. Eric, Peter and Kefe wander off. John has a few quiet words with the man and lets him go. They all agree, once we’re back in the combi, that there was no point in making things tougher for an old man.

By now, Eric needs to get back to his job and the combi is throwing fits. We decide to cross the Aberdares and go to Nyahururu where Eric can catch a ride to Mweiga.

For my part, I had a few more ghosts in mind. Ghosts from 1952. Back then, the town was named Thomson Falls and was Kenya’s most northern colonial town. And it was smack in the midst of Kikuyu lands.

When the Mau Mau rebellion broke out in, one of the servants who worked for the Rusk family let in a party of raiders who brutally killed the father and the mother. Then they hunted down the six-year-old boy who was hiding under his bed and macheted him to death. In a macabre twist, one of the killers played the family piano, leaving bloody fingerprints on the keyboard.

I think, perhaps, up to that point, both sides could have talked their way out of the war that followed, but once those fingers played the piano, neither the settlers nor the Kikuy showed charity. I ask around but nobody remembers the Rusk name or where they might have once lived. Some people give me peculiar looks and ask why I would care. To be honest, I don’t have a ready answer.

I walk up the road from the Thomson Falls Lodge towards town. Maybe somebody there will know. To my left, in a low-slung building, stands a Roman Catholic charity. As I stand looking at it, a woman stops, as Kenyans do when they see a puzzled stranger, and asks what I’m looking for.

“Oh nothing,” I said. “Just wondering what that building was for.”

“That is an orphanage.” The woman seems dissatisfied with my lack of response, so she goes on. “It is an orphanage for the children whose parents have died of AIDS.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, forgetting that Kenyans take religion seriously and don’t care for that sort of talk. “What do the children do when they get out? Do they get an education?”

“Oh yes, they are educated and are free to leave at age twenty-one. But not one has ever left.”

“Why?”

“Because the children also have AIDS. They die before they get that old. We just try to give them a happy childhood.”

In the U.S., children with AIDS take drugs and lead normal lives. In Kenya, with the coffers pilfered by corruption, they die, a point made by the U.S. ambassador a few years ago. Looking at 18 corrupt government contracts that were part of the Anglo-Leasing scandal in 2003-2004 and siphoned $751 million out of the Kenyan Treasury, the ambassador suggested a bitter way of looking at it. He said the money lost would have been enough to supply every HIV-positive Kenyan with anti-retroviral drugs for 10 years. Certainly, the money taken dwarfed the $521 million Western countries poured into Kenya to build up the economy.

Maybe that’s why Kenyans forget their old ghosts. There are always new ones every day.

Nyahururu’s home for orphans with AIDS.

***

The next day, Peter and I load up the combi for the run down to Mweiga. It’s sunny with puffy clouds floating about. The long rains should have started by now, but it’s clear they won’t come today.

We set off, running up the side of one Aberdares foothill and speeding down the far slope. The road is cut into the sides of the foothills and the government, not surprisingly, didn’t have the money needed to put in guard rails. The drop offs tend to catch your attention.

The government also didn’t have the money to fill any of the potholes which is why Kenyan drivers sometimes drive on the wrong side of the road. They are dodging the potholes on their side.

Peter in the foreground, his brother Kefa in the back.

It’s one of these potholes that nearly kills us.

Peter hit it going about 70 on the downhill run, and the combi’s moaning engine goes dead quiet. In an older model vehicle, like a land rover, it wouldn’t be too much trouble. But the combi is power everything: power brakes, power steering, and we're without power.

In the sudden hush, we’re still going 70 down a twisting road without guardrails but now Peter can’t steer very well and he can’t really stop. He’s pounds the brake pedal and his muscles bulge as he wrenches the wheel around. We hurtle past uphill drivers, sideswiping them.

For my part, I’m having a tough time believing it all. For some reason, all I can think of is how ridiculous the situation is.

Peter lifts the hand brake, and we begin to slow. He manages to ease the combi onto the dirt shoulder and the tires dig into the loose gravel. He pulls up harder on the brake, and, finally, near the bottom, we stop.

Peter, who is nearly always laughing about something, jumps out and walks to the side of the road and sits down. He doesn’t say anything but sits there for what seems a long time

We work on the engine, but I’m not much help. I don’t know a carburetor from a tortoise, and I’m not sure the combi has one or both installed. After pinging about with the wrench, Peter announces it is the fuel pump. The jarring from the pothole knocked it offline. No fuel, no power, no engine. He whacks it back into position with a wrench. Even I know that’s not a good thing.

But we’ve still got cross 50 miles of foothills before we reach Mweiga. It’s a long trip, and a slow one, creeping down the slopes at 20, but we make it.

Two fewer ghosts for Kenya to cope with than otherwise, but who would notice?

The effing combi.