PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

tended to change. They viewed themselves as helpless and had to relate to
others in a way that would not jeopardize their chances of survival. I got
the impression that the interviewees’ responses to questions somehow
become part and parcel of their response to drought and famine
predicament. For instance, I became quite convinced, as I carefully looked
at their response to questions about the impact of drought, that the people
quite deliberately exaggerated their livestock losses to project a seriously
gloomy reflection on their socio-economic status. My respondents, if not
all, viewed this as an opportunity to determine the level of destitution for
the purpose of removing the better off from the famine relief lists as if they
stood to gain by exaggerating their livestock loses. For example, when the
question was asked: “How many animals did you lose in the 2005-2006
droughts?” the answer would be: “I lost everything” (Household Interview
11 th February 2007, Morulem village). Nobody really wanted to volunteer
information about existing livestock wealth. Projecting misery was
erroneously thought of as a means of increasing the household chances of
getting better treatment when food is distributed. They were all
complaining of being cheated out of their rightful share of food which came
either too little or too infrequently. This scenario forced me to continually
explain to each and every household interviewed that I was simply a
student carrying out research, the content of which will be analyzed for
writing an academic thesis, and that it had nothing to do with the
availability of relief food. The use of other data techniques also helped to
verify the information acquired.
The question of numbers was really a big problem among the Turkana
people. Responses to questions about numbers presented some difficulties
because the Turkana nomads have a peculiar system of counting their
livestock. For instance if a man was asked: ‘How many goats did you have
before the drought?”. The answer would be: arei (meaning two). But when
you sought to know where exactly the two goats used to forage, the answer
was: one was at locality Y with my second wife and one was at locality X
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