At dawn, there had been only desert, scrub, a few thorn trees. But as the sky blued, dozens of goats and cows crested a sand dune, unfurling like a wave. Their shepherds came next, rail-thin men wrapped in bright patterned cloth. Wielding staffs of gnarled branches, they herded their livestock towards a mass of spiny shrubs. Then, they waited.

This was the animal market of Lodwar, a daily event that had brought together livestock owners and buyers for generations. Life moved to old rhythms here in Turkana, Kenya’s most northwesterly region and among its most arid. But that was starting to change, which was why I had come.

“Are you ready?” Maurice asked. A Turkana native, he oversaw local operations for the British charity that employed us both. The first thing I’d noticed about him was his pants, pressed to a brutal crispness. The second was how his face, lean and lightly grooved like the bark of a young tree, showed no fatigue from picking up another colleague and me early that morning from the airstrip with only a thin slice of moon lighting his way.

For twenty years, the charity we worked for had provided food, water pumps, and animal medicines to the region’s pastoralists, who made up most of its inhabitants; the soil here has long been too dry to farm. But in 2011, those remedies proved to be no match for the drought that racked East Africa, the worst in 60 years. The international community was caught off guard — not necessarily by the emergency itself, which had been forecast for months, but by the speed and scale of its obliteration. Crisis meetings were called; emergency rations air-dropped. None of it was enough. Over 260,000 people perished, many of them refugees and pastoralists.

In the aftermath, donors declared it was time to do aid differently, to find innovative, lasting ways of making the region and its people self-sufficient. But the nonprofit industry has never been known for its agility. Some years on, its funds shriveled from failing to meet donors’ demands for fresh ideas, the British charity hired me — twenty-six, fresh out of grad school, and cheap for an economist. My terms of reference were lofty, tasking me with “identifying new economic opportunities for the impoverished communities of Turkana.”

Were they delusional, or was I? That day outside the animal market, I practically shook with nervous self-importance: finally, a chance to apply years of studying how countries got rich, all those obtuse theories and variables, to a place that needed exactly that sort of help.

“Yes, we’re ready,” I told Maurice. Alexis, the thirty-something “partnership expert” from the charity’s London headquarters who had flown in with me from Nairobi, nodded his assent. I didn’t know what his title meant, and he hadn’t explained; I guessed it had something to do with fundraising.

Maurice led us to four herders squatting under a fan palm, introducing us in Turkana. I caught our names followed by “England” and “America” and before I could correct him — I was Canadian — he’d already moved on. The shepherds nodded as he spoke, their elbows resting on their knees. I marveled at how comfortable they looked, like they could stay that way for hours even though their butts did not touch the ground. They reminded me of my great-grandmother, who’d spent much of her life crouched over an earthen stove in her south Indian village — a life that had always seemed unimaginably far from my own.

“They are open for your questions,” Maurice said.

I looked down at the paper I clutched, the “Shepherd Interview Guide.” I’d drafted it in my mother’s home in Calgary, in my old bedroom, posters of The Matrix and V for Vendetta still taped to the walls. I’d skimmed a few studies on the economics of pastoralism, the Wikipedia page on Turkana, and jotted down the first questions that came to mind: What are all the ways they earn money? Why do they sell their animals when they do? How do they decide on the price that they are willing to sell at? What is their level of income/profit? What is their volume of sales? What threats or risks do they face in the immediate or longer terms? Aside from livestock, what opportunities do they see for work?

With Maurice translating, Alexis and I began awkwardly, asking the shepherds’ names and where they came from. They came, they said, from all over Turkana; they were nomads whose homes followed the rains and riverbeds. And what they wanted was simple: to graze their flocks, raise their children, and make sure both had enough to eat. The challenges they described were visible all around. The rains were coming less often; grasses were growing parched. And their animals, sometimes entire herds, were thinning into bones and dust.

“Our animals lose weight faster in the dry season, which is longer and longer these days,” a young herder told us. “And when the rains come too late, we have no choice but to sell the animals at low prices before they die.”

“Uh-huh,” Alexis interrupted. “So, looking forward, is there anything else you could do to earn money?”

The shepherds stared at us. In the silence, I felt the sweat pooling under my bra. I knew we made an odd pair, Alexis and I: him, skinny and spectacled with milky skin, next to me, brown and wide-hipped, frizzy hair curling wildly in the humidity. But whether I liked it or not, our foreignness united us. We were the only ones guzzling liter bottles of filtered water and rubbing our eyes to get the sand and sleep out. The only ones asking questions everyone else seemed to know the answers to.

Finally, the eldest of the shepherds, a man with a face like a map, said something to make the others chuckle. Maurice cracked a smile.

“He said, ‘You can’t teach an old goat new tricks,’” Maurice explained. “You Americans have some such saying, no?” he looked at me.

I smiled. What else to do? “Yes,” I said. “We do.”

We heard the pickup then, a rumble of torque and diesel barrelling towards us. When it braked, a woman in royal purple—top, skirt, and hijab—started barking at the herders before she even stepped out, sending them scrambling to their feet.

“That’s Madam Mariam,” Maurice said. “She’s one of the big butchers here.” He explained that most of the butchers were Muslim, ensuring the meat was halal wherever it was sold. I had a sudden image of the Islamic principle in practice, the butcher blessing the animal, anointing it as holy—as worthy of prayer—before killing it with a swift jugular incision. A dignified death.

Madam ignored us, pointing to a group of goats and naming a price that made the shepherds’ faces go stiff with outrage. She eyed them for a moment before sighing and suggesting another figure. They shook their heads again but less vigorously this time.

“This could go on for a while,” Maurice warned us.

By then, with the sun bearing down punishingly, the other herders and their animals had left to seek shade’s mercy elsewhere. With no other interview prospects, we piled back into the truck.

As we approached Lodwar town, the county capital, small shops appeared selling bananas, powdered milk and animal feed; burlap bags of maize germ and cottonseed cakes sat in front of every duka. Pharmacies in town advertised both “human and animal medications.” And next to the Kobil petrol station, a woman crouched over a low charcoal stove, carefully turning kebabs.

“Nyama choma,” Maurice said. “Roasted goat meat. A local specialty.”

What would this place, these people, be without their animals, I wondered. It was hard to imagine, even as someone who had just encountered it.

A few months earlier, in a different type of cowtown, I’d burrowed into my mother’s couch, the cushions sagging beneath my unrelenting weight. I was supposed to be looking for jobs. Instead, I rewatched all four seasons of Scandal.

As soon I’d returned from grad school in Europe, I’d felt life draining from me like water over a sharp cliff. If a place can steal a person’s vitality, Calgary, the self-proclaimed “heart of the New West,” never failed to leach mine.

I should have been used to it; my family had left India more than a decade ago for western Canada. My father, an engineer, had read about Alberta’s oil sands, the 170 billion barrels underground, the world’s largest known oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. Within months of applying, he got his work visa. We landed in Calgary on my tenth birthday.

I’d hated it from the start: its gargantuan malls, the women clad in Lululemon leggings, the Hummers with their “Politics Free Zone” bumper stickers. The Stampede, the world’s biggest rodeo, a ten-day festival where people who’d never ridden a horse dressed up like cowboys, drinking themselves into some kind of Western fantasy that I didn’t understand but knew, with a deep and abiding certainty, had no place for people who looked like me.

Most of all, I hated that my family was part of it, our bellies full and our house warm thanks to my father’s generous oil salary. Deep down, I knew this wealth was neither free nor fair. Even as Calgary became the richest city in Canada, dozens froze to death every winter, the homeless shelters as full as they were underfunded. And that, I suspected, was just scratching the surface.

By the time I finished college, I dreamt only of escaping, getting a job where I could help lessen the gap between wealthy and poor. So, I went to grad school to study economics, believing poverty could be solved like a straightforward equation: plug in the right variables, tweak some numbers, and voila.

But what I learned was the opposite: wealth did not follow such a simple formula, and many aid programs — commonly known as “wealth creation programs” — failed to make any lasting difference.

Still, I wasn’t discouraged: just like I’d thought I was better than most Calgarians, I also secretly believed I was smarter and more creative than all the economists and aid workers who’d come before me. I would crack the code, find the ideal solutions for other people’s lives.

But a year after graduating, too inexperienced to get any of the aid jobs I wanted and running out of money, I’d returned to my mother’s house in Calgary. I was sure my loathing for the city would drive me to find a way to escape it again. Instead, it just sank me into depression, and the couch.

That was until one day, mindlessly scrolling Facebook, I saw a friend post about the job in East Africa. I sat up, clicked.

Four months later, in March 2015, I was in Turkana, being paid to ask Kenyan pastoralists — some of them three times my age — what else they might like to do with their lives.

Back in Lodwar, we pulled up to the wrought-iron gates of the Ceamo Prestige Lodge. Barbed-wire topped walls wrapped around the salmon-pink building, unapologetically colonial in style with oversized verandahs, marble floors and Venetian columns. To say it was out of place in the desert, among Lodwar’s simple matchbox homes, would be an understatement — and also unnecessary, since that was clearly the point. My single room with the air-conditioning already on blast cost $800 for the week. Under my linen shirt, I wore a money belt swollen with thousand-shilling bills — more, I knew, than the average Turkana earned in a year. The band bit into my belly, pinching every time I moved.

“You will probably meet some oil people here,” Maurice said, nosing the truck inside the courtyard. “It’s becoming big business in Turkana, you know.”

I knew. Sort of. From Wikipedia, I’d learned that oil was discovered here three years ago. Since then, locals had hoped the industry’s arrival would lead to jobs and better infrastructure: wells, asphalt roads, electricity that didn’t rely on a generator. But I also knew from my father that oil deposits took many years to pinpoint, extract, actualize — and monetize.

Alexis would be eager to meet any oil people. “What if we just linked the shepherds with the oil companies?” he’d asked me the week before on Skype, his face an excited, pixelated blur. “They must need people to work the rigs or whatever, right? And meat to feed their employees, which, obviously, the shepherds could provide.”

I’d thought of my favorite professor in grad school, a woman with a shock of white hair and the blasé attitude that came with tenure. More than once, she’d mocked how aid programs loved making “linkages” — bringing parties together to do business with each other, often without a full understanding of the people or institutions they were trying to ally. Though an oft-cited development program in Malawi did help collectives of small-scale farmers sell their crops to a large cotton ginning company, such successful matchmaking was rare. But to Alexis I’d said nothing, just nodded. Maybe we could be another Malawi.

That night, our first in Turkana, Alexis and I drank White Caps in the hotel courtyard. Below our table, a dung beetle was amassing a sizable ball. The night was a cool blue, full of possibility.

There were indeed oil people here — oil men, specifically. Chinese, British, Kenyan, American, Canadian. Some in dirt-splotched overalls, others in suits, collars wilted from the heat. Snippets of their conversations floated by us: “Well tests came back looking good, should be able to start drilling soon”; “Stock up on snacks and whatnot here, I’m telling you — there’s nothing down there.” Every man seemed to be either on his way to or back from Lokichar, two hours south of Lodwar, the center of oil exploration.

Alexis rose and strode to their table. “You mind if we join you?” he asked, already pulling out a chair. I hung back, embarrassed by his confidence and also jealous of it.

From his place at the table, an older man gazed at us through gold-rimmed glasses. The oil lamp flickering on the table made his lenses dance with light. But behind them, his stare was penetrating. I could tell he was puzzling over whether I was mzungu or mohindi — white or Indian, foreigner or part of the country’s merchant class of Indian Kenyans.

“Actually, we do mind,” he finally said. “We have business to discuss.”

Alexis’s face fell. “Oh, yes, of course,” he stuttered. “Maybe another night?”

We slunk back to our table. Our dinner of bean stew and ugali arrived, and we ate in silence. The evening breeze swept sand onto my sandaled feet. I curled my toes, relishing the rough particles. I was relieved. My whole life, I’d fielded questions about where I was from — no, where I was really from. I hadn’t come 8,000 miles just to do that again. Neither did I want to sit around with a bunch of oil executives, the very people I was glad to have left behind in Alberta. Though tonight we were only a few feet apart, I knew these men inhabited another world, one where the fates of pastoralists were as distant as the moon that night.

Over the next two weeks, Maurice, Alexis, and I traversed what felt like the entirety of Turkana, a yawning landscape of beige sand and outcroppings of basalt rock, both hot to the touch. Once in a while, domed huts of thatch appeared, but we often didn’t see a single sign of human life for hours. Or at least, I didn’t. Unerringly, Maurice negotiated sand and scrub in four-wheel drive, guiding us to villages whose roads had been erased by wind and time. Where I saw only pale dunes and sunburnt grass, Maurice pointed out camel droppings, an ancient hand-dug well, the bent ear of a palm frond.

In Lokichogio, 120 miles north of Lodwar, we met a shepherd named Sikon. “Of course we will only sell the animals as a last resort,” she told us. Bright beaded necklaces encircled her neck, elongating an already lanky body. Sikon was in town for only a few days to trade goat milk for maize and tobacco. From here, she would join her sons and goats upcountry. Together, they would walk to the Turkwel river like they did around this time every year, when the banks filled with sweetgrass. But these last years, “who knows what we’ll find, maybe the grass will be dry, or it won’t have grown at all,” she said. Everything in Turkana, including the skies, was in flux.

“What are we without our animals?” she asked, echoing the question I’d had about this place on my very first day. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Yes, we can sell them for cash to the traders that come from Nairobi and Uganda. But what do we need the cash for most?” She looked at us expectantly. When we stared blankly back at her, she sighed, continuing in a voice clearly meant for idiots. “We need it to buy medicine for the animals. That, we can’t trade for. But if there’s no animals, no need for cash.”

Sikon’s sister, who was also in Loki trading for grains, chimed in. “We hear the oil people are going to bring lots of money here. You tell them we don’t want more money, we want just medicines for the animals,” she said. She smiled, revealing gleaming white teeth. “And if they’re feeling generous, they can get us some more goats too!” The sisters shrieked in delight at this idea, playfully slapping each other’s arms.

But the topic of oil, and oil companies typically provoked a very different reaction in Turkana. In Lowarengak, we crowded into a duka selling Honeycrisp apples and Dairy Milk chocolate.

“How do you see your business growing?” I asked the owner.

She rested her heavily ringed hands on the countertop, crowded with sales ledgers and glass jars of mandazi. “Well, of course I hoped the oil companies would buy my goods. And maybe my children could go work on the wells.” She paused, measuring her next words. “And I hear they’ve built some schools and whatnot around the wells. But they don’t give us business.” Townspeople, crowded into the duka to see what had drawn the foreigners, murmured in agreement. “They bring everything in from Nairobi or even abroad: food, meat, drinks, everything. They think we Turkana cannot meet their standards. That we’re just dumb upcountry folks.”

“Asante, bwana,” Maurice interrupted. “We’ve taken enough of your time,” he said to the duka owner. Then, he spun around, striding toward the truck without looking back. Alarmed, Alexis and I lurched after him, mumbling apologies as we pushed through the crowd. The air felt like it was going to crack open.

On the drive back, we were silent, Alexis and I wondering what had just happened. Outside, the sun had burned the shadows off all the trees except one. Beneath that acacia sat a man, his goats milling around him. As we drove by, he threw his arms around one of them, hugging the animal as it nuzzled his chin. Tenderness rose in my throat. After days of feeling disoriented, the proverbial stranger in a strange land, there was something about that gesture — so universal, so unabashedly intimate — that threatened to undo me.

Eventually, Maurice spoke. “One of Turkana’s MPs led a protest two years ago near Lokichar,” he said. “There were hundreds of protesters, asking for more jobs and contracts to supply goods to the oil companies. At first, it was peaceful, but then, protesters stormed the facility. No one was hurt, but the foreign workers were evacuated. Since then, things have been very tense.” He paused, as if debating whether to say more. “Talking about ‘hopes’ can bring up bad memories here.”

I felt a kind of ringing in my ears. “If we can’t ask about what people want, how can we help get it to them?” I asked.

For what felt like a long time, no one spoke. Finally, Alexis said, “If it comes down to that, we’ll just have to make our best guesses.”

I wondered how many other aid programs had been based on “best guesses,” effectively dooming themselves from the start. But that day, I didn’t have any better alternative to suggest. And so, I said nothing.

Outside, a flock of black and white swallows flittered, flying as if to keep up with us, failing.

At the hotel, a pickup with “Africa Oil” lettered on its side was pulling out of the courtyard.

“The name is misleading,” Maurice said. “It’s actually a Canadian company.”

I stared at the truck. Misleading? No — suggesting the oil was being developed by and for Africans when that absolutely wasn’t the case was beyond misleading — it was an outright lie.

That afternoon, as a dust storm browned out my room’s single window, I did some research. Within minutes, the internet confirmed what Maurice had said: Africa Oil, which owned 25 percent of Turkana’s oil was indeed Canadian, with its headquarters in Vancouver and another office in Calgary. UK-based Tullow Oil and France’s Total (now known as TotalEnergies) owned the rest.

I wasn’t sure what disgusted me more: the deception of these companies or my own naivete. Even when oil prices were high, I’d known oil companies in Canada were hunting for deposits in “frontier markets” with fewer regulations, making it cheaper to do business and maximize profits. And apparently, they’d found it in Kenya, where the minister of energy had handed out exploration licenses in a process criticized for its lack of transparency.

Iraq was another oil frontier, one where my father now oversaw production in the country’s Kurdish region—or so I’d learned on LinkedIn. My parents had divorced a week before my sixteenth birthday; afterward, he and I lost touch quickly, inevitably, like a river drying up. The last time I’d spoken to my father, he’d still been in Canada, overseeing production in Fort MacMurray, the epicenter of Alberta’s oil industry. I’d asked him how production worked — what do you actually do? — but he’d brushed away my question, saying it was too boring to talk about.

Soon, I found a National Geographic feature describing the process: “To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt […] then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds.”

That wasn’t boring, it was brutal, and I wondered which part of this grisly ritual my father carried out. But there, I stopped myself. Did I really want to know? We were family; his legacy also mine. His ability to transmute fossil remains into energy had brought us to Canada, given me the life I had there.

That, too, was why I’d been so desperate to leave. Staying there, where nearly every business, every job, was tied to oil, meant my life would be inseparable from the earth’s ruin. But now, more than eight thousand miles away, here was turning out to be not so different. The same forces that had made Calgary into an oil town — and that had made Calgary rich — were also at work in Turkana. Maybe this was the real secret to how places became wealthy. Maybe those changes were inevitable.

The day before, we’d met a guy selling bags of charcoal on the roadside. He looked barely out of his teens, his jaw shiny and hairless. “There’s no future here,” he told us. His family had been pastoralists for generations, but he saw that way of life as doomed. “I’m just trying to save enough to move to Lokichar and get a job there, either in oil or construction.”

“That’s great!” Alexis said, excited. “How could we help more people like you to do that?”

He eyed Alexis skeptically. “You can give me some money for transport?”

“Oh no, I didn’t mean right now,” Alexis said. “I meant, you know, in the long term, maybe in a few months…” he trailed off. I thought again of my professor, of the bite in her voice when she talked about the months or even years that elapsed between the moment a nonprofit began researching what a community needed and actually delivering aid. In the meantime, that community’s needs often changed, sometimes completely.

“Right,” the charcoal seller said, his face hardening. “Well, people here are waking up, and more of us are leaving to where the money is. So by the time you can give us some transport funds, I pray we won’t need it.”

Every evening, before Maurice dropped us off at the lodge, Alexis tossed out ideas: a start-up contest where pastoralists compete to get funding for “side businesses.” Livestock insurance to reimburse shepherds if drought decimated their animals. A job fair to help the Turkana find jobs with the oil companies.

To each idea, Maurice was lukewarm, loyal to the solar-powered water pumps and animal medicines the charity had provided for years. “Those are useful for people here; I’m sure of that,” he argued.

“Maurice, we have to innovate,” Alexis said. He sounded exasperated. “Donors won’t fund the same things they did ten years ago.”

I remembered the animal pharmacy in Lowarengak, its rusted door drooping from the hinges. Above it, a sign that read “From the American People.” The blue and red logo of the US Agency for International Development was nearly washed out. What new solution to poverty would be sexy enough to open donors’ wallets?

“Fine,” Maurice said finally. “So, do we go to Lokichar or Kakuma? We can’t do both in the time left.”

Both places were on our list. Lokichar was our only shot at getting face time with the oil execs, our only chance to urge them to give jobs to locals and buy their animals. At the very least, we could lobby for animals to be allowed on what was now company land.

“No one had a title to the area, so the companies just took it!” one pastoralist had complained. Aluminum hoops jangled from his ears. “But it’s community land. It cannot be sold or owned.” A year later, in 2016, the Kenyan government would allow communities to legally register and own their communal lands. But until then, claims of land belonging to a collective were often disputed. And even after that, the process was likely to remain out of reach for people who couldn’t read or write — people like the Turkana whose stories and knowledge lived on only in oral traditions.

I thought of the Cree in Canada. Before becoming the heart of Canada’s oil exploits, Fort McMurray had been home to the Cree First Nations, who’d used the surface-level oil deposits to waterproof their canoes. (What if that’s all oil was intended to do: repel a river, keep a people afloat?) But in the 18th century, the Europeans arrived and took it all for themselves: the oil and the water and the rich, green land.

If going to Lokichar might help Turkana’s pastoralists lay claim to the wealth flowing beneath their feet, then going to Kakuma seemed just as necessary for different reasons. With a population of some 180,000 at any given time, it was one of the world’s largest refugee camps, hosting people from more than a dozen neighboring countries.

“I vote for Kakuma,” I said, surprising myself. “Alexis, you said yourself that no development project here can ignore Kakuma.”

“That’s true,” Alexis admitted. “And donors love programs that include refugees in some way.” He paused, debating. “Kakuma it is.”

The next morning arrived blue and sticky with heat. We set off north on the A1 highway, the same rutted road we’d taken east to Lowarengak, our heads bumping against the car roof. But soon, the jolts smoothed. Before us: miles of fresh, dark tarmac.

“We call it the ‘UN road,’” Maurice explained. “Since so many UN convoys travel to Kakuma, they decided to make it easier for themselves and pave it.” He smiled grimly.

Like us, the UN was here to help locals. And while a good road did help Turkana, it primarily helped the UN itself, making its staff’s road travel infinitely more comfortable. I thought of my own comfort, my hotel room with its air conditioning and Egyptian cotton sheets. I thought of my CV and my bank account, both of which would be fattened by this assignment. And I thought of the people we were supposed to help, the shepherds for whom we’d shape a future that wasn’t ours to live. Finally, when I couldn’t bear to think anymore, I closed my eyes, hoping Kakuma would distract me from the uncomfortable truths lodging in my brain.

At first glance, the town looked a lot like Lodwar: two intersecting main roads, acacia trees, dukas selling bags of grain and airtime. A single blue and white Barclays ATM. A riverbed bisected the town, its body dry and depressed with the memory of water.

But beyond the town center was a different reality: chain-link fences guarded a vibrant metropolis, which looked to be bigger and busier than the town itself. Under the midday sun, rows of metal roofs glittered, their lines stretching into the horizon. Hundreds of people hurried and strolled and chatted and laughed and loitered. “Welcome to Kakuma,” a sign read. 3,700 acres large.

At the entrance, a metal detector beeped incessantly as residents passed through. The guard paid no mind, his entire being focused on the Premier League game playing on a small TV. On the other side of the gate, a UNHCR employee named Edgar, greeted us.

“You’d like a tour, yes? Just a short one though, to give you a flavor,” he said, already striding ahead. “I’ve been here five years and even I haven’t seen it all!”

Our first stop was a sprawling food market, everything from gunpowder tea to gruyère cheese on sale, a selection not unlike that of a North American supermarket. Calls of “Mzungu, mzungu, what will you have?” followed us.

“We are in the South Sudanese quarter now, which is the largest one,” Edgar said. “That’s the residential part over there.” He pointed to the houses surrounding the market, small constructions of thatch and mud and tin. “About half of the 180,000 refugees in Kakuma come from South Sudan.”

Vaguely, I remembered that South Sudan’s government and militia groups had been warring for decades, the conflict intensifying with the discovery of oil in the late 1970s. The desperation to control oil-rich areas turned obscene, with child soldiers and starving civilians in opposition-held areas. Later, I looked up the statistics: more than 17,000 children were used in the fighting, while two million people were killed and four million displaced.

“Refugees often spend years here, sometimes decades, before being resettled elsewhere,” Edgar continued. From the doorway of a house, a teenage girl watched us, her eyes flat and her face as smooth and opaque as a river rock.

I looked at her and then at the desert, strewn with “temporary” houses that were not at all temporary. Here were oil’s true costs, embodied in ways I’d never imagined: families separated, scattered from burning homes, crossing thousands of miles on foot to an uncertain future.

“Edgar, what about the livestock market?” Alexis interrupted. The sun had heated his face to a tomato red.

“Oh! For that, you will have to wait until morning. No one is there now.”

We spent the night in the UNHCR compound. Outside my room, a generator rattled, churning out electricity for staff and guests even as darkness engulfed the other homes in the camp. Guiltily, I switched off my light. But I could still see, moonbeams filtering through the window. Under that dappled light, I shook out my cargo pants, watching sand shower the ground. By the time I was done, there was almost enough sand to build a small castle. I stood there, amazed. I couldn’t believe my legs had worn all of that desert. What else was I carrying—on me, within me—that I didn’t know about?

The next morning, we set off before sunrise, driving to the animal market under a sky still thick with stars.

“They must slaughter the animals before it gets too hot,” Edgar explained. “Otherwise, the smell becomes too much.”

The odors of iron-rich blood and unwashed bodies hit me as soon as I stepped out of the truck, the smells so sharp my eyes watered. But no one else seemed bothered. Dozens of butchers, shepherds, and women shopping for the night’s dinner milled around the slaughter slabs. On one, a goat’s eyes bulged as a sweating hijabed woman slit its throat. On another, two butchers peeled the hide off a cow. And next to the third, a camel lay upside down, its legs splayed skyward as its guts were carved out.

Last night’s chicken and rice rose back up my throat. I gagged, then forced myself to swallow. Pull it together, I thought.

That day, we interviewed a butcher, two livestock traders, and a handful of shepherds. I remember the butcher clutched newspaper-wrapped cuts of meat in both hands, the blood staining the newsprint. I remember the traders looked over our heads, scanning for animals that looked hardy, no fleas. I remember the pastoralists looked worn, their voices edged with fatigue and grief. Throughout, the sound of knife meeting furred flesh, the goat’s bleat like a terrified child’s, kept playing in my head. Of our conversations, I remember only snippets.

The secret is to cut in one continuous motion. No jerking, no stopping. Just straight through until the trachea is severed.

Herders, they are not very smart. You want to help them, you tell them not to always wait until the last minute to sell, when their animals are too thin. You tell them they’d make a lot more money if they sold earlier, when the animals are still healthy. But they’re too irrational.

Why did we sell? What choice did we have? Grazing lands are shrinking, water is harder to find. It was either sell, or let them starve. We are not cruel.

On the way back to Lodwar, Alexis sighed into the midday warmth. “I wish we’d gone to Lokichar,” he said. Turning to look at me, he asked, “Don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t deny that going to Lokichar would probably have been more useful. For pastoralists, there had been a lot at stake: jobs, buyers for their livestock, land. But what type of future would we be helping to create by going there? I could picture it already: the pistoning pumpjacks, the tanks of petrol still warm from the earth. There would be no animals, only meat. And maybe a building with our charity’s logo: a vocational school where shepherds forgot the taste of goat’s milk and how to find water five feet below ground, learning instead how to be oil men and women, how to drill and steam and frack, to separate that precious liquid from its home of fossil and shale.

The whole scene would look ordinary. Just business as usual. Except it wasn’t: livestock was this place’s business, and also more than that. I thought of Sikon asking who she’d be without her animals, knowing that for her, there was no answer. I thought of the man nuzzling his goats under the acacia tree, of the herders in Kakuma literally killing their animals out of kindness. And I thought of the old woman we’d met outside Nadwat yesterday, her skin papery and darkened by a life under the sun. I’d asked her the standard questions: when and why she sold her animals, how she decided the price. She’d gaped at me, her eyes wet. “Why are you asking me about the worst things in my life?”

I stared back, stunned into silence. For weeks, I’d thought I’d been asking pastoralists about their business lives, their professional dealings. But maybe I’d actually been prodding at their deepest griefs.

Every day, it became more clear to me that animals were the center of life here; they were a source from which everything else sprung. And when that center could no longer hold — either because an animal was too weak or because its owner was driven to desperation, cash-starved for medicine or food for the rest of the family — when the animal could no longer go on, its death was, if not graceful, at least honorable.

Maybe we should have gone to Lokichar, looked Turkana’s future in the face instead of turning away from it. But it was too late for that now.

“Wow, there’s really nothing around here, huh,” Alexis said, peering out the window. I looked at the back of his yellow head, sweat plastering his fine hair to a painfully sunburned neck. In that moment, I hated him. How could he still see the palm fronds and desert scrub, prime grazing lands, as “nothing”?

In the rearview mirror, I saw my anger reflected in the grim line of Maurice’s lips. Yesterday, he’d told me that after Alexis and I left, he would return to Lokitaung, in the very north of Turkana, for the weekend.

“My family is there, and also my cows,” he’d said, smiling in anticipation. So, his life was also joined with animals. He hadn’t told us that before, and I hadn’t thought to ask. Learning this, I’d felt deflated. What else we had we failed to ask about? What else would remain unknown to us about this place and its people? And more significantly, what shouldn’t we have asked at all if we considered the peace of pastoralists to be more important than any understanding outsiders might reach?

Back at the hotel, the three of us sat in the outdoor cafeteria, drinking warm Fantas. The power had been off since last night. Behind the lodge, the generator sputtered and died, sending up giant plumes of smoke. It seemed even the Prestige Lodge wasn’t totally immune to Turkana’s realities. As some poor soul tried to restart it for the umpteenth time, we had our final debrief.

“So,” Alexis began, “Let’s hear your ideas. I’m all ears!” His enthusiasm sounded forced.

After a pause, I ventured, “maybe we could support local activists? Or fund reporting on how oil development is affecting communities here?”

Confusion creased Alexis’ forehead. He’d probably expected to hear about quick wins, efficient ways to move pastoralists into more lucrative work. That was, after all, what I’d been hired to come up with. But after two weeks, it was obvious that money was not the end itself here, but a means to different ends: usually to a future with animals. Given the choice between having more money and keeping their livestock, I was convinced most Turkana would choose their animals. But by that point, my strongest conviction was this: We definitely shouldn’t be deciding what help they needed; we barely understood their priorities. For all our questions, we hadn’t bothered to ask that fundamental one: What do you most need?

“Alexis, whatever you think the donors will fund, I’m okay with,” Maurice said. “I think the solar pumps are good — but whatever you think is okay.” He looked down at his bottle of Fanta, beading with sweat in the afternoon heat. I couldn’t blame him. Without the help of charities, Turkana’s pastoralists would be on their own against climate change, against oil companies, and against a government that cared little for them or their land.

Some years later, the charity’s website would highlight its “solar innovation, skills training, and knowledge sharing” projects in Turkana. I would spend hours clicking and scrolling, trying to decipher what projects had finally been fresh enough, sexy enough, innovative enough. I would devour the annual report and years of press releases, desperate to understand what finally convinced donors that the Turkana might one day cease living at the mercy of droughts and famines and other natural disasters. I would look, too, for signs of our research, evidence that our dozens of interviews and hundreds of miles traveled had provided some insight into the lives and dreams of pastoralists. I would look, all the while knowing that even if our research had been used, it hadn’t been worth it — my consulting fees, Alexis’s and Maurice’s salaries for the week, the hotel and fuel costs, the hundreds of hours of others’ time we’d taken up asking all the wrong questions.

I wouldn’t find what I was looking for.

Maybe I knew that even before leaving. Maybe some part of me sensed it on the plane back to Nairobi, looking down at the landscape that just hours ago had seemed infinite, almost too big to wrap my mind around. Now, from the window, it was small enough to fit in my palm, just a pocket of sand and scrub crowning Kenya’s Rift Valley. I squinted, suddenly desperate to see the Turkwel river. I thought of Sikon: was she there with her family? And was the river dry as she feared, or was its heart a deep blue, its banks lush and green?

As the plane ascended and Turkana shrunk to a speck, I imagined I could see the ancient patterns of herders’ desert crossings, a journey that never ended. I imagined I could still hear the sounds of herding sticks and animals’ footfalls on the sand, that I could see human and animal lives intertwined. Then the plane rose higher, and soon there were only clouds.