When he was a child, James Owuor loved hearing the elders talk about the way life used to be. So it comes as something of a surprise that at 38, he is now the one tasked with the job of describing the Before Times in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Before Lake Baringo started to rise, before it flooded and stole everything he knew.
[Read more at TIME]
“At the beginning, we just thought it was a bad rainy season, that the water would recede when the dry season came. It didn’t,” he says ruefully, peering over the edge of his motorized canoe at what used to be houses below the milky brown waters. Over the past decade, an unprecedented increase in annual rainfall—widely attributed to climate change—has raised the lake by 40 ft. (12 m), inundating nearly 22,000 acres and destroying homes, businesses and Roberts Camp, the lakeside resort where Owuor has worked for most of his adult life.
In 2014, he watched the waters overtake the two-story-tall shorefront lodge. The restaurant went next, then the bar. In September, the resort’s entrance gate on the road to the nearby town of Kampi Ya Samaki went under. Navigating through the drowned remnants of downtown, Owuor points out the remains of a fish factory’s roof. A crocodile paddles past the submerged rooms of the Lake Breeze Restaurant and Bar while a hippo grunts from the nave of a flooded church.
Water laps at the third-floor balconies of the luxury Soi Safari Lodge, an 80-room resort that once employed 300 locals.
Eventually, he says, “people will have to leave this place and find somewhere else to live. If they were running a business, that means they probably will not have that business anymore. Life is drastically going to change.”
An even bigger threat looms. The nearby alkaline Lake Bogoria is also rising. Twice as salty as seawater, and home to more than a million flamingos, Lake Bogoria is on the brink of breaching its own natural barriers. If the waters rise up by another 4 m, says Professor Simon M. Onywere, a geologist at Kenyatta University’s department of environmental planning, it could flood freshwater Lake Baringo with a deadly spill of alkaline waters.
Nothing short of a catastrophic drought—the kind that would also destroy livelihoods—will stop the rising waters. “The people here will have to leave,” says Chepsoi. Many, he says, are already being forced to migrate to neighboring towns and cities largely unprepared for the influx. “The pressure of so many new arrivals will overwhelm the services providers,” he worries. “They are not prepared with housing, water, health care facilities or police.” Migration may be inevitable, but if the destination cannot absorb the new migrants, they may find themselves even worse off.
Judy Lewiri stands next to her former home on Ol Kokwe, an island within Lake Baringo. She was forced to move to higher ground and rebuild on borrowed land.
Families now wade though knee-deep water to get to their homes.
Festus and Veronica Parkolwa stand at the entrance of their former home by Lake Baringo in November.
In some parts of the world, climate change brings drought. In Kenya’s Rift Valley, it has brought torrential, out-of-season rains over the past decade, which, combined with deforestation, have resulted in rising waters in all of the valley’s eight lakes. Some have nearly doubled in size, drowning pastureland, farms, homes, schools, churches, clinics and businesses in what Elizabeth Meyerhoff, an American social anthropologist who studies Rift Valley communities, calls a “slow-motion tsunami.”
Sarah "Pirate" Mwaniki and her fishing crew make a plan for the night.
Gerrard Otieno sits on a boat in what used to be his living room. He is among hundreds of people displaced by Lake Nakuru's rising waters.
The remnants of Kilimo Estate by Lake Nakuru are now only accessible by boat.
When the rising waters of Lake Nakuru, 85 miles (137 km) south of Lake Baringo, claimed the rural settlement of Mwariki in September, Evelyn Ajuang, a 41-year-old widow with close-cropped dark hair, had nowhere to go. She had just spent her entire life savings building and furnishing a four-bedroom house and had nothing to fall back on.
So Ajuang took a single room in a low-income neighborhood in the middle of Nakuru town. She sold her goats and chickens to cover three months’ rent—besides, the concrete warren of crammed shacks offered no space for livestock.
Ajuang, like most of us, has only a vague understanding of how rising carbon emissions could trigger the rains that have flooded the Rift Valley lakes, but she knows enough to blame it for destroying her life. “Climate change is why I don’t think I will ever return to my home,” she says, eyeing the four rooms’ worth of furniture stacked to the ceiling of her rented room.
Wading hip-deep past what used to be her front porch one recent afternoon, she shoos away a pelican stalking fish in her old goat pen. Referring to the hustle that helped her get her own home, she says she would happily do it all over again, given an opportunity. She just needs a dry piece of land to start. “Without somewhere to go, the dreams I had for my future and my life will end just like that.”