With Kenya’s Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria rising for months now, following above-average rainfall across the Rift Valley over recent years, this summer has seen them – and the communities around them – reach tipping point.
By: Anne Macharia in Nairobi
Samuel Loruman points past the bow of his rowboat, toward a shifting green mat of water hyacinth.
His father's cattle boma – a livestock enclosure – once stood there. Now there is only water. Beneath it, he says, the fence posts are still standing.
"I did not move house," he says, as he rows over what used to be his family's grazing land near Kampi Samaki. "The lake moved into my house."
Since 2011, Lake Baringo and its smaller neighbour, Lake Bogoria, have risen dramatically, tied to above-average rainfall.
In May this year the situation reached tipping point, with the water swallowing up farms, schools, a health centre and long stretches of shoreline road.
Loruman, 43, grew up herding goats and growing sorghum on land his grandfather cleared. That land now sits roughly 4 metres underwater.
He earns his living differently these days, paddling a hand-built boat out to fish tilapia, the way lakeside families do.
"My father would not recognise me holding a net instead of a herding stick," he says. "At the beginning, it felt like becoming nobody."
He has since built a new home for himself. He also sits on a community committee allocating fishing zones, and has taught a dozen former farmers how to read the water.
"The lake has weather the way the sky has weather," he says. "Nobody taught me this. The lake taught me, usually by nearly killing me first."
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