Welcome to Kenya’s remote and dusty Manchester

 Residents of Manchester village in Wajir County hike a lift atop a goats’ van. PHOTOS: PIUS CHERUIYOT/ STANDARD]
Wajir, Kenya: The little boy clutches onto his mother, hurting from what the young woman suspects is a chest infection. She is frantically trying to get him to the nearest hospital more than three hours away. Her dust covered face is pale, aged by life’s challenges. She is no mood to talk when we meet her in the driver’s cabin of a battered dark mini-van ferrying goats to Wajir town.

The driver, who operates the vehicle like a matatu, is also carrying three other passengers. But they are hanging precariously on the most unlikely of places - the overhead carrier. The driver tells me he had picked the sick child and the mother from Manchester.

Did he just say Manchester? Yes, Manchester, he clarifies.

Lofty ambitions

We are in the middle of nowhere on the road heading to Wajir and my curiosity is piqued by the name of a village that is everything Manchester City in England is not. Manchester is after all the sixth largest city in the UK, with a population of 514,417.

Famous throughout the world thanks its two football clubs, Manchester United and Manchester City, the city owes it’s rise to the boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution and is a key commercial hub in England.

So, I am naturally curious to know more about a presumably dusty village in the middle of a humid North Eastern Province that shares the same name with an industrial city in Europe.

About 30 minutes into the drive, plowing through heavy sand, we veer South to Dadaab and finally arrive at Manchester. There are no giant billboards or a swathe of heavy traffic to inform you of your location, save for a huge oval-shaped water pan that could pass for a small football stadium from a distance.

And that is possibly where the similarities end between this village and the home of both Man City – current holders of the British Premier League title – and Man Utd football clubs in Northern England.

Across the dusty road, thousands of goats have come to drink at a communal watering point. I soon realise this is not the sort of place I am likely to see Yaya Toure or Wayne Rooney walking along the road.

“We aspire to develop like other parts of the world; perhaps to be like Manchester which I hear is a big city,” says Ragow Noor Omar, a resident in his 70s. “One day, we shall have good football players here too.”

A boy races across the village, proudly donning a Brazil yellow jersey and says he is backing the World Cup hosts in the ongoing tournament. In his timidity, he admits he does not know which countries Brazil has played against so far. The villagers do not have the luxury of following the ongoing World Cup finals for lack of electricity and TVs.

But before this dusty village achieves the rather lofty ambitions of becoming a town, much less a city, it must address its basic and urgent problems.

For a start, the roads into the village are horrific. There are no healthcare facilities and the population of about 30 households depends on county hospitals that are more than 100km away.

There are no schools either for tens of kilometers, which could explain why everyone in the village, including the youth, speak in the native Somali language.

Kiswahili and English is rarely heard here. Fellow journalist Hamza Yusuf helps us cut through the maze of translation. To our dismay, we learn that education has never been a priority for this pastoralist community. Omar was among the first people to settle here more than 20 years ago. He was here when nearly all livestock died from starvation. “It is a two-year cycle before a severe drought hits us, every time with disastrous impact,” he says.

Harsh lessons

Villagers project that next year could be catastrophic. Harsh lessons have been learnt over the last two decades in conservation of water though. The massive water pan for instance, has been fenced-off to keep both people and animals away.

Water from the pan can last the village several months, and is delivered by a diesel-powered pump to a small concrete tank. The village employs an administrator, a local young man, who operates the water pump while regulating water usage. Goats are charged Sh2 to drink from the watering troughs, while herders pay Sh10 and Sh20 for each cow and camel.That is a lot of money for dirt poor villages struggling to find their next meal amidst the barren wilderness.

The operator collects about Sh6,000 a day that is spent on maintaining the water pump and purchasing diesel. The organisational structure here is unique as water pans are open for all in most other villages across the largely arid Northern Kenya.

So how did the village acquire the name Manchester? Omar says that the name has been coined from the original, Machesa. In the Somali language, Machesa literally translates to ‘no joke’, probably because of the harsh living conditions around.

Government services, including security, are largely absent. Villagers have to rely on their own creativity to keep safe from external aggression, get their sick to the nearest hospital and even manage the little valuable resource of water. Elders are the law and jury in resolving internal issues amongst villagers.

But even with its name, I could not spot a single villager sporting the famous Manchester United red shirt. As it stands however, the little village is light-years behind the prominent English city it shares a name with, thousands of miles away. But this does not prevent the little village from dreaming.