We jumped right into things on the first day - 3 hours of sleep or not we had to get ready for the COHI workshop. The usually cast of characters was present. My friend Ian was waiting at the airport to greet us. I first met Ian back in 2018 all because of avocados. I brought a bunch with me from Kapenguria and Ian, who was working in my hotel’s kitchen at the time, was kind enough to cut them up and put them in my omelette when I handed them to him one morning. From avocados to a family who I consider some of my closest friends in the world – every reunion a joyous occasion. Ava and Clara had been hearing about Ian for over 2 months. I can image meeting him fulfilled part of the story of Turkana in their mind - seen through my eyes but now becoming their reality. Manu and Mercy and the rest of the staff at Quanam Woods were waiting for us – just like I had never left even though it had been over a year. And Gavin, his energetic hug pulling me down, his new obsession – Ava and Clara – waiting in the wings. My friend Chris, his Scottish drawl of welcome a welcome refrain. Time is frozen even when life is moving.

I wish I had the cultural competency to write an epic Kenyan novel - like Edward Rutherford, titled “Lodwar” – with stories of some of my friends and the coming together of Kenya and the Northern Frontier, of colonialists and farmers and humanitarians and pastoralists - oh of pastoralists – of emurons and ng’adakarin and villages and the abor dry season grazing areas and the ere and the herds and the family and the child sent to school and the child married and the child protecting the camels from raiders with a gun; of drinking 2 liters of water every morning and every evening and burning in between, of drama and death and life and tragedy and triumph – oh of the pastoralists in the world ever changing and ever staying the same.

I just finished Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and while I thought it was an excellent book – I didn’t find the description of pastoral life that compelling. There were descriptions of people and animals moving over vast distances, from Marsabit County in Kenya to Ethiopia to Uganda, but there was never an explanation of why. Maybe that’s just what happens when a pastoralism researcher reads a novel; other people might not be interested in that much detail. The harshness of the landscape was represented, and interesting spiritual aspects, and a lot on livestock raiding but there was no why.

But I digress. During my PhD I worked with community members and the Turkana County government to develop COHI - a One Health monitoring tool that uses participatory appraisal/epidemiology methods to assess the current state of human, animal, and environmental health relative to community priorities (i.e., it’s primarily a normative measurement not a biophysical one). We got some money from a Springboard grant at Tufts to validate COHI, and so this year we will be rolling the tool out in Turkana, Marsabit County in Kenya, and the Afar Region in Ethiopia. Exciting stuff! We are also working with John and Julieta this summer, two Turkana University students who just finished their Community Health degrees. I have incredible memories of working with Rita and Thierry from the University of Rwanda during my summer there as a veterinary student. I love Hellen’s (my PhD mentor and now Postdoc supervisor) emphasis on bringing Tufts and local students together. It’s such an important and rewarding part of the process.

Back to day 1 - we headed over to the PAIR offices to get ready for the workshop. I started working with Pastoralists Adaptive Initiatives for Resilience (PAIR) over a year ago. The type of research I do, my ethos isn’t of objectivity in the purely positivist sense, it’s that research should be part of change, of activism, of action. In other words, I am proud to be PAIR’s Research Director because I want my research to actually mean something in people’s lives - not to be the savior - but to be part of collective action, governance, and community in Turkana, to make a difference. Otherwise, why are we doing this?

Erupe met us at the office, excited to get started. He was my research assistant last year and probably knows more about COHI than anyone in the world except for me. Philip was also waiting for us in the office. He’s one of my closest friends in Turkana who I met early in my PhD, but got to know well during the COHI indicator selection workshop last year. He has decades of experience in nutrition and humanitarian action, supporting everything from WASH to Kimormor One Health integrated service delivery.

Ok - I still haven’t managed to get to the workshop. In short, I had originally planned to train just the students before we got to the field. But then we heard that other NGOs would be interested in using COHI we decided to open it up to a few other organizations. In my sleep-deprived state, I managed to cover One Health and COHI developed on the first day, next we moved to participatory appraisal and participatory epidemiology methods, before a field practicum at Natoot Farm on day three. On the final day of the workshop we worked on COHI data analysis and dissemination plans, including bringing interested participants from Natoot to join us for the day. One of my biggest takeaways was that beyond COHI, the participatory methods were extremely popular. Mary plans to use them in her PhD research exploring gender policy in Kenya, while many others were excited to include them in their community-based research and programming. I still remembering my taking my first participatory epidemiology class with Jeff Mariner and realizing how much you could do with relatively simple methods, from disease surveillance to impact assessment. It makes me really happy that I can pass that on to a whole new generation of researchers.

After enjoying some pool time at St. Theresa’s and hiking to the top of Lodwar Hill with Gavin in tow (he drank all of our water; maybe I’ll let Clara tell you about that one), we were ready to head to the field on Monday – Lokiriama here we come.

Lokiriama, Ebola, and Naps

Maybe you read Ebola and got concerned - but let me explain. It’s the dry season in Lokiriama, the rains came in May but stopped in June. You cattle can only eat grass, your camels and goats and sheep need water. What do you do? Go to Karamoja, Uganda – the highlands. This type of seasonal migration is called transhumance and is a feature of life in Turkana - in the lowest depression of the Rift Valley. In one of our sessions with elders in Lokiriama Centre they drew a map (participatory appraisal strikes again) of the dry and wet season grazing areas (see image below). Right now the livestock and majority of the people are in Karamoja, in the abor – the dry season grazing areas like Tukum, Kolikit, Ngasogolo, and others. The other side of the river, including Ngikorikipi and Ngataparin are reserved for the wet season. In fact, the elders told us if you take your animals to abor during the wet season you will be punished and fined. This type of rangeland management – keeping certain areas in reserve for when you need them is a critical aspect of pastoralism that is often overlooked, when pastoralists are accused of letting their animal roam freely with little oversight.

This type of seasonal grazing poses a challenge for COHI - if you are trying to assess the health of people and livestock for a single location (e.g., village or adakar –mobile settlement), how do you account for those in Karamoja? We collected data at adakar Paiteni near Lomokori Centre – the older people who couldn’t make it to Uganda and young children remained behind with small herds of sheep and goats in the ere/egos, the home base where the herds return in the wet season. But can we really say we conducted a COHI assessment for Paiteni when most of the people and animals weren’t even there? And this is where Ebola comes into the picture. Because you might be saying to yourself, Evan, just take your team and go to where the people and livestock are in Uganda - you have the map, what’s the issue? Well, the issue is how the US government feels about Uganda at the moment. We recently got an email from the State Department that anyone who had been in Uganda can only enter the US from 4 airports and will undergo specific screening. Even though the DRC is on the opposite side of the country and there was no risk of ebola in Karamoja, I made the (correct) decision not to officially enter the country and get our passports stamped. The team was disappointed. Ava and Clara in particular listened to my stories of climbing Mount Moroto and swimming at the top and felt a burning desire to visit Karamoja – but there’s always next year. The US government, especially now, isn’t known for nuanced decision making and I didn’t want to risk a difficult re-entry.

After 3 weeks in the field, I’m actually wondering what a “location” is? Are we using western terms for inherently mobile social organization structures? The county administrative units include sub-counties, wards, and villages. But even people living in Lokiriama Centre, a village, don’t constitute a complete social group with the majority of livestock and many people at abor. People in the ere risk being left behind and left out. They aren’t recognized as a settlement, even when they should be. Before this year, I had primarily referred to mobile settlements as “kraals.” What I realized was that this term completely flattens how people and livestock move across the landscape and organize themselves – it’s an English term that doesn’t reflect the complexity of the situation. I have to thank my friend Claudia who is doing her PhD research in Turkana and first opened my eyes to these terms, along with a great book I read that summarizes 20 years of research in Turkana over the 80s and 90s: awi (the homestead; typically a man and his wives and children), ere/egos (the home base; where people return during the rainy season; typically passed down through families), adakar/ng’adkarin pl. (an extended or multiple families living together; has a mobile connotation), arumum (many adakars grouped together), arigan (many adakars; typically along the border with a military connotation - protecting livestock against raids), achok (grazing pattern where livestock are watered in the morning, leave for grazing, then return home and are watered again, abor (dry season grazing areas; typically in higher elevation areas like Karamoja, Uganda). Thanks to Claudia and our conversations over the last 3 months, the first page of the COHI data collection form actually asks these questions: what is the name of this place? How are people and livestock organized? I’m so excited to see what the equivalent terms and descriptions are in Marsabit and Afar Ethiopia when we expand the COHI there. In short – I am anti the term “kraal.” I’m being a bit facetious, but the term flattens the meaning of the socioecologically complex way of life in Turkana, to the detriment of those who want to understand it.

What can I tell you about our fieldwork? We spent the first week in Lokiriama Centre and a nearby adakar - Peiteni. We slowly started to figure out our protocol for COHI: Day 1 we tackle the human health and healthcare and livestock health and veterinary services parts of the questionnaire. If there’s time, we start some of the household food security data collection. On day 2, we cover water/rangeland and social aspects (e.g., livelihoods, conflict, school enrollment, etc). We started using participatory mapping for the water and rangeland sections. Having people draw a map of where the water points are and grazing areas is such a great conversation point to ask probing questions: is the borehole water salty? Where are the livestock grazing right now? We often visit the health facility that people in that place use for a key informant interview to triangulate the community data we’ve gathered.

For the human and livestock health sections, we always start with a participatory epidemiology exercise for adults and children, and adult and young livestock. Since there’s not enough time to do every livestock species (even though I would want to), we first prioritize the livestock species. So far goats and sheep (i.e., shoats) have been the most important species in every place. Some common reasons are that they can be sold for food, to buy livestock drugs, to send children to school, etc. In other words, goats are the bank account. For adult shoats, Lomoo (PPR) and Loukoi (CCPP) have been the most common disease, which doesn’t surprise me too much. Loreng maleteny has been the most common and deadly in young shoats. I didn’t know too much about this disease before our recent fieldwork – it’s been so interesting to split into young and adult livestock and see the clear differences. Loreng maleteny (pronounced LOReng MALetang - yes it’s a ‘g’ that’s not a typo) refers to enterotoxaemia as a result of overgrowth of Clostridium perfringens type D. My veterinary friends will be very familiar with Clostridium - it’s a nasty bacteria that causes many diseases in livestock like tetanus and black quarter. The name refers to the red color of the intestines. It has an extremely high mortality rate - up to 100% in young sheep and goats. I’m not sure how widespread the enterotexaemia vaccine is in Kenya, but after our findings, I would advocate for it’s use in Turkana alongside more common vaccines like PPR, CCPP, and sheep and goat pox.

It is quite novel that we are using participatory epidemiology methods for human diseases. Besides a paper a I published a few years ago and one study in Karamoja by my friend Raphael looking at waterborne diseases, these methods have not been applied to human-specific diseases. What will we learn by engaging community members in disease surveillance? While I haven’t extensively gone over our results yet, we are seeing a very high burden of Malaria in adults and children, perhaps unsurprisingly. Other common and deadly diseases in adults include HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and Kalazar (i.e., leishmaniasis). In children, measles and pneumonia are some of the most common infections. I’m excited to dive into this data and see what it tells us about disease burden in Lokiriama.

It has been really gratifying to see the growth of the team. Clara and Ava have learned how to conduct focus groups discussions and key informant interviews and work closely with John and Julieta to make the translation process as seamless as possible. Erupe’s experience with COHI and livestock health are invaluable. He’s turned into team leader. Philip’s over 20 years of experience with nutrition and pastoral livelihoods has been a real asset. He will often ask questions none of us think of, and based on his experience with nutrition assessment at the household level, he has trained the team in how to conduct the reduced coping strategy index questionnaire. I love taking a step back and watching people master the skills that I’ve developed over a decade of research in Turkana. This mentorship thing is what I want to do!

Arumrum Alokir Ewoi: A Scene

There’s so much to tell you and never enough time. Let me set the scene for the last week I was in the field: We drove to Uruum from the Lokiriama Guest House. It was over an hour along roads split by cracks in the ground; the road collapsed from a rainy season flood, as hard as that is to image now. There are rocks around every corner and bumps and swerves and creeping along slowly slowly (pole pole); and goats (ngakinei) and camels (ngikaala) alongside in the hills, dry river beds, and a sore back. We picked up the Uruum chief and headed to Komio, a location about 15 kms west of Uruum right along the Ugandan border. There we met Elder Lokir who is the leader of the Arumrum Alokir Ewoi (group of adakars in the area). Someone described him as the radio of the area, he walks to the the abor grazing areas in Uganda and returns with the news: how is the water and pasture, what livestock diseases are driving down milk production, how are relations with the Matheniko (Karamojong people) and Ugandan government. We wanted to know where the closest water point was so he started walking down the laga, the dry river bed, a tributary of the Tarach river that goes all the way to Kakuma and the refugee camps. The environment in Komio lush and green, a sharp contrast to the dry acacia and scorched earth closer to Lokiriama Centre.

Around every corner was another tree or bush with medicinal properties - this fruit for pregnant women with an upset stomach, this plant for malaria, the list goes on and on. I want to write a separate blog with just what we have been learning about medicinal plants and wild foods; it could fill an entire textbook. We ate fresh ngachokio from the sandy ground, the sweet fig taste a sharp contrast against the gritty seeds. Ngachokio comes from the echoke tree, the sycamore fig, and is a critical dry season food source as we would come to find out. Cognizant of time, I kept asking: “Are we there yet?” We’re close, we’re close, elder Lokir kept insisting. This is the rhythm of pastoralism, walking along the laga to the nearest water point, the go-away-birds and weavers a constant background refrain. When a pastoralist tells you it’s close it might mean you are still hours away. Walking 30 or 50 km is a fact of life. After a few kilometers, we made our way down smooth stones and through sharp cliffs, rock drawings to ward away evil spirits – a nearby shallow well had collapsed killing people inside. We rounded the corner and saw a few small cows, too young for the rigors of abor, and people – we had arrived. The well was about 15 feet deep. Two young girls formed a relay to bring water up the a large basin for the animals to drink out of – insects buzzing around them in a swarm. We learned that this shallow well never goes dry, a rare occurrence in Turkana. It also has rock walls at the bottom so there is very little risk of collapse.

By the time we had walked back to the where we parked the cars enough people had gathered to start the focus groups – summoned by Elder Lokir. The next day a group of us went to where people are living to collect food security data. It turns out there were five eres that constituted Arumrum Alokir Ewoi: Ere Apaelio, Ere Lokir, Ere Ewoi, Ere Epakan, and Ere Lowoyakani. Each ere contained 10-15 households. Julieta and I focused on Ere Apaelio, while Philip and John went to two others. The demarkation between eres was very clear. For example, one of our study participants was helping us find Philip in Ere Lokir. She said she was born there but married into Ere Apaelio, so she wasn’t able to walk freely among the huts in Ere Lokir – she walked along the edge of the clearing. She explained that one you get married, you can’t return to your old family – signifying the marriage bond.

One thing I noticed right away is that the huts were built on stilts off the ground. Huts for the young kids and lambs are like this, so they aren’t exposed to worms (helminths) – but I had never seen it for people’s homes. It turns out the logic was similar. Women explained that ekurut used to bite them and cause wounds. They decided to build their huts off the ground and that solved the problem! I am still trying to figure out what ekurut is - maybe some type of larvae or insect? They called it the “white one.” Since it’s visible, I don’t think it’s tapeworm or something like that. I’ve been reaching out to some of my friends doing research in Turkana to see if they know what it is - stay tuned!

What we found in Arumrum Alokir Ewoi is that it’s mainly older mothers with some young children who are currently living in the ere. All of the young adults and most of the children were at abor near Kobebe dam – although we heard that the dam had dried up, forcing some families to consider coming back to Kenya. The mothers we were discussing food security with noted how little support they have - their sons return from abor occasionally with food for them, but they are mostly on their own. The women described life in abor, too demanding for them: people take milk from early in the morning to the evening as they are so busy with herding activities they don’t have time to eat anything else. Then the family will eat one meal in the evening, often maize or beans bought in the market in Moroto.

They also described how difficult it is for them to access food at the market. They had had their 500 kenya shilling stipend from the focus groups the previous day – but they had no way to travel to the market and buy corn and maize, staple foods. We have been discussing adding distance to market as another COHI indicator, based on our experience in the field. Many of them were primarily eating Ngachokio – a nutritious food source but not sufficient on its own. I have a feeling that these women left behind in ngiarerya (ere pl.) are often overlooked. In my experience, administrators in Turkana are primarily focused on the officially designated settlements – the villages. We have had some difficulty even explaining to chiefs that we want to visit ngiadakarin, the adakar. They kept sending us to villages even when we explained that we wanted to go to the mobile settlements. I wonder if this is an area PAIR can focus on - mapping and understanding these living arrangements to make sure no one is overlooked if they don’t live near a village.

As our time at Komio comes to an end, a moment: we walked back to the vehicles along the road from the ere. Four women asked if they could get a ride back to Uruum – otherwise they would have to walk in the brutal heat. We fit them in the bench seats in the back of the Land Cruiser. All of a sudden, I heard a song. I looked in the back and the women were covering their faces. John explained that they had never travelled in a car before and although they were scared, they were also happy. Joyous and courageous; a song for the moment in community and gratitude.

I’m sharing the full recording of my defense here for anyone interested in learning more about the Community One Health Index (COHI) and the broader research behind it.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about COHI, and take a look at our new publication in PLOS ONE: “Stakeholder priorities and conceptualization of One Health: Insights from fuzzy cognitive mapping and grounded theory.”

Looking forward to what comes next!

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Episode Description

On this episode of One Health Wednesdays, presented by One Life Epi Solutions (OLES), guest host Dr. Julia Zammit welcomes Dr. Evan Griffith, a veterinarian, One Health researcher and PhD candidate at Tufts University. With a background spanning conservation medicine, public health, and veterinary science, Dr. Griffith shares how his fieldwork with pastoralist communities in Turkana, Kenya, led to the creation of the Community One Health Index (COHI).

COHI is a participatory, data-driven tool that measures health, environment, and social indicators through a community-led lens. The episode explores the value of traditional ecological knowledge, gender-responsive data collection, and integrated service delivery, especially in nomadic populations where human, animal, and environmental health are deeply intertwined.

Evan also discusses how COHI could scale through real-time dashboards and GIS mapping, helping governments and NGOs make data-informed decisions.

Whether you're in public health, veterinary care, environmental science, or policy, this episode offers actionable insight into building sustainable, inclusive One Health solutions.

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I have this idea for a short story, or maybe a novel. A Turkana family somehow finds themselves in Central Massachusetts, Ekadele, Adipo and their kids, Ekam, Esekon, and Lokoumwa.

What follows is a Shakespearean comedy of misunderstandings, confusion, conflict, and community. There are multiple Karens, neighborhood associations, and school boards involved. I have this picture in my mind of Ekadele walking along Bull Run, near where I live, carefully herding his goats as they eat hydrangeas, lilacs, forsythia bushes, and that beautiful, thick Kentucky bluegrass. I should interrogate this vision. When a Turkana family comes to MA they’ll likely be model citizens: leaders, entrepreneurs, and neighbors. Their kids will do great in school, like so many immigrant families. But part of me dreams for the day when a herd of goats tears through those perfectly manicured lawns, and the chaos that would ensue.

I keep returning to this image, goats roaming over “The Maze” of neighborhoods in Holden. I think it comes from knowing I’m probably making all of the same mistakes I’d have Ekadele and his family make in my story – mistakes born of cultural confusion, misread intentions, and mismatched assumptions. After another few weeks in the field, I’ve never felt so comfortable in Turkana, or aware of how different our worlds really are. But when I get a chance to work here, and to truly engage with people with such different life experiences to me, we build new worlds together.

The Road West

We left Lodwar around 9 am on our way to Lokiriama to start data collection. I was sitting in the front seat, to my right was Benjamin, our driver. Benjamin is a cool dude – bald head, sharp goatee. Likes to talk Kenyan (and American) politics and is always watching TikTok videos on his phone.

In the back is my supervisor from the University of Nairobi, Dr. Catherine Kaluwa, now the head of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology. Dr. Catherine is a One Health and gender expert and has worked with my PhD advisor at Tufts, Prof Amuguni, for years. Next to Catherine is Erupe, translator and research assistant. Erupe is from Lodwar and is an intern in the veterinary department. Last year he, along with a few other veterinary interns, transcribed our focus group recordings. This year, when I needed help in the field, I immediately thought of him – curious, enthusiastic, and hungry to learn. Birds, trees, ethnoveterinary practices, you name it. The future is bright.

Next to Erupe is my friend, colleague, and mentor, Dr. Ronoh. A subcounty veterinary officer and county epidemiologist. We built a strong relationship, after years of working together. We both were trained in participatory epidemiology by Jeff Mariner. In many ways we are counterparts. There’s no one I trust more except for Hellen and Catherine to guide and support my research.

Lokiriama is about 2.5 hours west of Lodwar, close to the Ugandan border. Incidentally, I had just passed through during the previous week on my way to an International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) meeting in Moroto- a story for another day. This time we were setting up shop at the Lokiriama Guest House, where we’d base our community activities.

During the first hour or so of our drive, prosopis (Etirae) dominated the landscape, closing in the dry riverbeds until the sun is filtered through a green mat of branches, casting shadows on the windshield. I’ve written about Etirae before. Our research last year showed how it outcompetes native trees, limiting browsing resources. It’s water-hungry, with significant landscape-level impacts. Thickets become so dense that women struggle to fetch water. The thorns cause deep, slow-healing wounds. If goats eat too many seed pods, their teeth rot and fall out.

And yet, Etirae is also a valuable resource. It provides firewood, fencing, and charcoal, which can be sold—possibly reducing deforestation of native trees. Etirae is here to stay. The real question is how to manage it sustainably—supporting livelihoods while protecting indigenous trees. One example comes from my friend Chris at Nara. They have a few projects turning Etirae into biochar to revitalize degraded soil and increase carbon sequestration in Turkana.

West of Lorugum, the landscape changed. Tall, graceful umbrella acacia (Acacia tortilis) began to dominate. The adult acacia are called Ewoi, the young Etir. These trees are essential for dry-season grazing; livestock depend on their seed pods. They also offer precious shade from Turkana’s intense sun. Benjamin mentioned that people in this region don’t cut down mature trees for firewood—a theme of conservation we’d hear again and again throughout the week.

Community Conversations

We arrived in Lokiriama – a small cluster of manyattas nestled in the shadow of Mount Moroto, the mountain looming to the west like a silent guardian, promising rain and dry-season grazing.

Our first focus group was with both men and women, a departure from our usual gender-specific groups. Mixed groups can spark especially dynamic conversations, though sometimes younger women, especially, hesitate to speak freely in the presence of their elders.

We opened with our usual question: “What do you need to be healthy and successful in Lokiriama?” This prompt helps to identify One Health priority areas, human health, animal health, rangeland resources, and water, and sets the stage for a deeper conversation about indicators in each domain.

Interestingly, participants began not with infrastructure or disease, but with family dynamics. They spoke of the importance of a strong relationship between father and mother. When that relationship is good, it creates harmony in the household, supports better coordination, and results in successful children – whether in school or herding. The men in particular, emphasized leadership. A good leader, they said, guides his family, earns the respect of the community, and unites people to achieve common goals.

While we eventually moved into a deeper discussion of One Health domains, it was this early conversation and social and cultural factors that stayed with me. It underscored how deeply these dynamics shape health and well-being and why One Health cannot – and should not – focus solely on disease.

The next day we traveled west, in search of Morita Kraal. One of the assistant chiefs in Lokiriama, Ekaro, was helping to facilitate our research activities. Chiefs are important figures in Turkana – national government representatives responsible for security, access to services, and community engagement. I often work with chiefs and village administrators (the county-level equivalent) and without their support, this work wouldn’t be possible.

As we drove, Ekaro stopped several times to ask where Morita had relocated. This is the reality of fieldwork among pastoralists: kraal location shift daily and seasonally, in response to rainfall, disease outbreaks, and insecurity. Eventually, we tracked it down—across the border in Uganda.

Morita was unlike any kraal I had visited before, because of their reliance on mining for income. And maybe this is the right moment to explain what I mean by “kraal.” In Turkana, adakar (ngadakarin, plural) are groups of pastoral households (awi) that move together under the leadership of a recognized figure. They are also referred to as “kraals.” Some are led by “generals,” who unite households for military strength—especially common along border regions where groups like the Karamojong, Jie, and Toposa compete with the Turkana for grazing and water. Others may be led by Emuron (seers), former chiefs, or successful businessmen. Kraals are often named in honor of their founding leader, a sign of respect and lineage.

Understanding the structure and mobility of kraals is essential for delivering human and animal health services. Darlington Akabwai, at the Tufts Feinstein International Center, who has worked in the region for decades, has emphasized how successful development in Turkana hinges on building upon these existing structures.

People in Morita Kraal were not only engaged in typical livestock-based livelihoods – they were also mining for gold. Small-scale gold mining is increasingly common in Turkana. Rock is extracted, ground down, and panned—usually for subsistence income. When we arrived, the rhythm of a generator split the morning stillness, hammering in a mechanical beat that made conversation nearly impossible. We peered down into narrow tunnels, ropes disappearing into the darkness where young men were digging—a dangerous occupation, especially given the frequent cave-ins.

There was a palpable sense of unease in Morita, a heaviness that hung in the air. It’s hard to describe. Maybe it was because the kraal was across the border, closer to the Tepeth, and at higher risk of livestock raids. Participants didn’t want to talk about their herds. This isn’t uncommon among pastoralists. One reason we use proportional piling is that it allows us to get population-level estimates without asking for specific livestock numbers. But even asking broad questions about livestock here drew suspicion. Perhaps they feared we might share information about herd locations with enemies.

We typically limit focus groups to around 8 participants to allow everyone space to speak. In Lomokori, we had over 30 people in each group—though only a few spoke. The chief told us it would be problematic to ask anyone to leave. Sometimes, you just have to adapt. I don’t want to overstate the perception of danger—or understate the tension. But we all felt it. That kind of feeling stays with you.

We conducted our discussions beneath the shade of an Elamach (Balanites glabra) tree. Elamach emerged across several locations as an important food source for both people and livestock. In Lochor-Alomala village, women described how they preserve the fruits for dry season consumption. First, they boil them for over 15 hours. Then they sun-dry the fruits until they can remove the tough outer capsule. After another few days of drying, the fruit is shelf-stable and can be stored for months—an essential source of food when little else is available.

Elamach is just one of many wild fruits that form a vital part of the Turkana diet. In speaking with nutrition experts in the county, I’ve noticed these wild foods are often overlooked in formal nutrition assessments. But they play a critical role in supporting health and resilience, especially during times of scarcity. The diversity of wild fruits, roots, and trees like Elamach underscores the importance of biodiversity in food security and health systems in dryland regions like Turkana.

Naitwa Akolong

The more time I spend in Turkana, the more comfortable I become. And frankly, I love interacting with people – from the everyday greeting of ejok, to receiving blessings from elders who touch your hands and gently spit in your direction. I’m not entirely sure why spitting is considered a blessing, but I assume it’s tied to the value of moisture in a place where water is so scarce. I don’t mean to romanticize or “other” these interactions. Instead, I want to share how coming together for a common cause—to improve health and well-being—has brought deeper meaning to my life.

One of my favorite moments from this trip has been how many of our women-specific focus groups began and ended with song. I don’t understand the words, but the melody is beautiful. There’s something profoundly moving about giving thanks together. The tension at Morita Kraal is an outlier contrasted with the rest of our research activities, characterized by warm welcomes, shared jokes, songs, and mutual gratitude. Even some of the methods we use—like proportional piling, where participants distribute 100 counters across One Health indicators to “weight” them—turn into joyful, even playful, experiences. There’s discussion, disagreement, laughter, and eventually, consensus.

At the beginning of each focus group, I introduce myself in a few ways. First, I say:

“Naitwa Daktari Evan Griffith. Mimi ni Merikani.”

“My name is Dr. Evan Griffith, and I’m an American” in Kiswahili, which most participants have some fluency in.

Then I add, with a grin:“Naitwa Akolong.”

That usually gets a few laughs. Akolong means “the sun” in Turkana—a name I was given in Lokiriama because of the season (the dry season, when the sun is most intense) and, I suspect, because of the brightness of my skin.

Other kraals have called me Apa ang’kaala, or “Father of Camels.” I have to admit—I prefer this name. It’s less about my appearance and more about my profession and love of camels! The introductions continue as Erupe translates the research overview, explains the consent process, and invites participants to introduce themselves. It’s a simple act, but one that builds rapport and a shared sense of purpose before we dive into the day’s activities.

As I reflect on these experiences in the field, I’m reminded of our differences– but also our shared humanity. We are building new worlds together, co-constructing knowledge in ways that are both meaningful and impactful: by valuing scientific and traditional knowledge systems, engaging in participatory methods that center community priorities, and challenging dominant approaches to knowledge production that often overlook or overwrite local perspectives.

In this relational process, knowledge emerges through encounter and reciprocity. Massachusetts and a Turkana kraal aren’t just two different cultures, but different ontological worlds, shaped by the relationship between people, animals, and the land. By leaning into the ontological turn, we move beyond asking what people believe to understanding how different lifeworlds produce different realities. What’s meaningful isn’t collapsing those worlds into one—but bringing them into dialogue. In that moment of ontological encounter, we co-create something new.

It’s a privilege I will carry with me for the rest of my life—to be engaged in this process of learning, unlearning, and building something together.

By the end of our nine focus group discussions across six different locations, we had reached saturation. The indicators and their weights for each One Health priority area were clear and well established.

All that was left was to pilot the Community One Health Index (COHI)—this PhD idea of mine that, only weeks ago, felt more like a pipe dream than a reality.

But that story—the pilot, and the results—will have to wait for the next post.

Stay tuned for the next story from the drylands.

Ejok noi (thank you),

Apa ang’kaala

Wildebeest Eco Camp, Nairobi, Kenya

Women’s traditional dress includes the aduwel (front apron) and abuo (back apron) decorated with intricate beads. These days, women don’t always wear the aprons, but other colorful skirts and wraps. Women’s ng'akoromwa (neck beads) are a sign of beauty and status in Turkana society, including a special metal necklace for married women that is the “key holder,” signifying her position in the family.

Weddings in Turkana are centered around livestock, like most of life. Over two to three days, the groom delivers livestock to the bride’s family. This is the “bride wealth” that is required to marry in Turkana. If any children are born before the marriage, they are considered part of the mother’s family. It’s only after the dowry has been paid that the husband’s family can “claim” the children. In the years and months leading up to the wedding, the groom borrows livestock from friends and family to pay the dowry. This reinforces existing social and familial ties.

Once the dowry is settled, the wedding ceremony can take place. The most important aspect of the ceremony is the killing of the bull, a ritual refereed to as ekuma, which is always done with a spear. During the wedding, the bull got loose and fled the scene, a lead line trailing behind it. As you can image, this caused a lot of excitement and many young man started to chase after it, on foot or on their motorbikes. At some point, a vehicle went to fetch the bull because it had died (after being speared) and they needed to carry it back to our location.

The bull was quickly skinned, and different pieces of meat were offered to the senior women in the bride’s family that were seated in a nearby enclosure. As the men carried pieces of meat to the other side of the clearing, they sang a song celebrating the bull and the process of sharing meat. They were answered by women also singing songs of celebration. I wish I knew the words, but the melody was beautiful!

Once that process was done, the real dancing could begin. The men gathered in a circle, led by one or two lead singers, engaging in a call and chorus song, emphasized by driving alternating feet into the ground every few beats. Women entered the center of the circle and what follows is a push and pull, back and forth between dancers, with men pushing forward into the circle and women enticingly retreating, rotating their hips from side-to-side, followed by women pushing outward with downward head movements towards the men. I can image for young people this is an exciting opportunity to show your interest! The inner and outer circles rotate, so you can target specific people to dance with. Every few minutes, the dancing stops, men sit back down on their ekicholong for a rest, before the call and chorus resumes. I was part of the dancing circle for around 40 minutes, and I can tell you even though the weather was cool, I was hot and sweaty by the end!

Following the dancing, I relaxed with my friend Erenius who had invited me and is a member of the grooms’ family, and refreshed myself with a few cold Tuskers. Once it got dark, we enjoyed Topetokon, a traditional method of roasting a whole goat without skinning it. A few warriors built up a big fire and put the goat in it, turning it every few minutes. The goat was then butchered and piping hot pieces of meat passed to everyone nearby. It was delicious, the slightly crispy skin layer adding a perfect texture and smokey taste to the juicy and succulent meat.

All in all, it was an experience that I won’t forget. I felt very welcome and at home during the whole wedding. Erenius’s family graciously welcomed me and everyone encouraged me to take part of the festivities! I was talking with a friend, and reflecting that people are similar all over the world. Here it’s livestock, at home we have wedding gifts and registries. At our wedding, Taty and I curated a special playlist with all of our favorite songs. We danced the night away! We had a delicious meal catered by a local restaurant and engaged in many wedding traditions (cutting the cake, father-daughter dance, speeches, etc.). There are different customs in each place of course, I have to say the wedding guests singing all the songs together was pretty amazing, but at the end of the day, it’s all a celebration between bride and groom and families.

Everything I’ve shared here is what I learned from talking to people this weekend, but if I’ve made any mistakes they are of course my own!

So long from Eliye Springs, along the shore of Lake Turkana. Research update coming soon!

Evan (aka Akolong, aka Apa ana’kaala)

Ryszard Kapuscinski captures it perfectly in The Shadow of the Sun: “Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat.”

But it’s not just the temperature. It’s the sudden shift in how you exist in a place—becoming an outsider, a figure of curiosity or notoriety, for no other reason than your whiteness.

My first week in Nairobi, I was graciously hosted by Cynthia and Erin and all the wonderful critters - missing each dog equally! But actually, Roho, please keep the couch warm for me. I was also supported by Lian Thomas and my other wonderful colleagues and friends at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). ILRI has always felt like a second home to me, and sharing a communal work space with all the other brilliant PhD students and post-docs at the One Health Centre in Africa (OHRECA) building on the ILRI campus was inspiring. It felt like we were all working towards a common goal.

Nairobi, like a lot of metropolitan places, is filled with diversity, so that feeling of ‘other’ isn’t very strong. I got to have a wonderful dinner with another close friend and colleague, Gabby, at the Carnivore Restaurant - overpriced food for tourists (but actually a great experience, so how can I complain?) was how I would describe it. It felt like I was back at Disney World surrounded by American families (except this time the safari park was real) with many, many small children to prove it - Eat your food kids, you just saw a lion. But Turkana is not Nairobi. And when you’re an “mzungu,” or foreigner, the experience is different.

I often insist on walking around Lodwar by myself, with every incredulous boda boda (motorbike) driver I pass waving at me – what is this guy doing?! Doesn’t he know he needs a ride?? It was more difficult when I didn’t know any Kiswahili. Now I just wave and smile, and yell, Hapana! Asante! (No thanks). Or give the universal head shake. It turns out that human nervous systems don’t like when every eye on the street involuntarily follows you. It puts you into a bit of flight or fight. I was trying to write a description of Lodwar (Town), but I realized that when I’m walking, I’m hyper aware of the attention, and less aware of my surroundings - again, human nervous system.

I’ve been thinking about a phrase a lot recently: judgement is the opposite of curiosity. I guess it’s a close approximation of Ted Lasso (if you know you know). In any case, it would be easy to close myself off, based on this public, intense scenario that I’ve described to you. And judge people - stay away from me, I’m freaked out. But in fact, the uncomfortable feeling I have walking around Lodwar has virtually nothing to do with my experience here, or how I feel ninety-nine percent of the time.

Let me tell you what Lodwar is really like. Lodwar is seeing my close friends Ian and Celeste and their beautiful children, and sharing a delicious dinner and chai with them in the evening as we listen – and amuse ourselves trying to dance, or is it just that I’m a funny dancer? – to music from my Spotify Liked Songs Playlist. Lodwar is seeing Ian every day as he drives me on his boda boda from the veterinary, to health, to environment offices, and everywhere in between. It is seeing my friend Manu again at the Quanam Woods Hotel next to the Turkwel River, and staying up too late to watch the Barcelona Champions League Game with him, even though he’s a Man U fan. It is spending hours at a local coffee shop with my friend Abby, catching up on everything that has happened over the past year, including the complete and relative hot f**cking mess both of our national politics are in right now. It is meeting a new friend Ikal and getting to visit her organization, Friends of Lake Turkana. We saw camels on the way! Camels!

Lodwar is playing hide and seek with a young boy, one of the hotel employee’s children, every night, and practicing counting to 10 in Kiswahili: moja, mbili, tatu, nne… as he goes to hide, then pops out at me, giggling madly. Bro really has not figured out the hiding thing yet. It’s giving that same boy my phone and watching him figure out the camera. And then he starts taking pictures of everyone, Manu, Alice, his mom, the restaurant, the display, me, him. The camera did something for him, he wanted to experience and record the world through it.

Lodwar is seeing Daktari Ronoh again, who rescued me back in 2018 as a young veterinary student when I had no idea what I was doing, but was willing to try (things haven’t changed much). And it’s planning the Community One Health Index (COHI) Participatory Indicator Selection and Weighting Workshop that starts tomorrow – facilitated by yours truly with the help of the Turkana County One Health Unit (COHU) and my close colleagues Erenius, Robert, Jacob, and Job, with the assist from Erupe. COHI, this community assessment tool that started off as my PhD fever dream, that I believe in deeply, but question constantly. And after this workshop, will be one step closer to actually being a tool that the government and partners can use. Like, what??

I’m up tonight, writing, hoping everything is planned well and will go off without a hitch tomorrow. But it probably won’t. Life is unpredictable—just like rain in Turkana. Before last Thursday, I had never seen it rain in Lodwar. Then, for five minutes, the sky opened up and the rain hammered down—only for the sun to return, pushing the heat back up to 99°F the next day. Research is like that. Life is like that. But if you stay open, curious, and engaged—if you seek community and solidarity, and learn to enjoy the rain when it comes—it all turns out okay.

From Quanam Woods, next to the Turkwel River, Lodwar, Turkana County, Kenya,

Evan

P.S. Stayed tuned on the workshop. I’ll let you know how it goes!

I don’t know what will happen to these initiatives in the coming days and weeks – it’s likely they will end. I can only hope that the government and other partners will step in to fill the void. What I do know is that ending international aid and dismantling USAID will cause untold suffering. Take Kimormor, for example. Turkana pastoralists in remote kraals along the borders don’t have access to dispensaries or health centers located in villages and towns. As a result, children often never receive the full vaccine course and die from preventable diseases. Women have little access to antenatal and postnatal care, dying from preventable pregnancy complications. Increasing frequency and severity of droughts in the region due to climate change increase food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition. Livestock forage, cash aid, and other humanitarian assistance are essential in these climate crises to save lives.

Pastoralists are eager to vaccinate and treat their livestock, but veterinarians struggle to reach these mobile kraals. Many Ngiturkana have never received a birth certificate or enrolled in the national health insurance fund (NHIF). Kimormor brings these vital services directly to communities, improving health and well-being outcomes and saving lives. This is just one small example of thousands of USAID-funded programs and initiatives that make a real difference in people’s lives around the world.

Beyond its development and life-saving humanitarian work, USAID is deeply invested in stopping the next global pandemic. Tufts is the implementing partner of STOP Spillover (STOPS) that operates in both Africa and Asia to understand and address threats posed by zoonotic viral diseases.1 I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of the STOPS in-country teams, including at the recent World One Health Congress in Cape Town. These teams do incredible community-based work that helps to identify and reduce threats of zoonotic disease spillover at the human-wildlife-environment interface.

If programs like STOPS are cut, we are less safe from viral zoonotic threats, and the risk of a future COVID-like pandemic looms closer. Consider the ongoing highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak in US dairy operations and ask yourself: How safe do you feel with anti-science, ‘America-first’ policymakers at the helm?

I’ve always slightly rolled my eyes at the USAID branding: “from the American people.” However, it illustrates an important point. When the US retreats from the international scene it creates a vacuum that other countries, like China, are more than willing to fill. For an administration that claims to be staunchly anti-China, this is a perplexing and counterproductive move. By stepping back, the U.S. cedes both influence and leadership on critical global issues, allowing its geopolitical rivals to strengthen their presence and relationships.

I’m distressed and angry about the unconstitutional executive actions taken by the new administration, including the international funding freeze that will lead to suffering, preventable deaths, and make us less safe. These cuts undermine not only humanitarian efforts but also global health security and resilience in the face of pandemics and climate change.

Like many, I initially felt overwhelmed by the relentless barrage of executive orders. No longer. It’s time to speak out, build community, and fight back against the cruel, anti-science, anti-women, so-called ‘America-first’ policies of this administration and work towards a more healthy, just, and sustainable future.

In solidarity,

Evan

Dr. Akanbi has a great series talking to different One Health experts and practitioners that you can find on her Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bolanle-akanbi-hakeem/

I am leaving for the World One Health Congress in just a few short days. I will be giving a talk on Developing, Piloting, and Validating the Community One Health Index. Hope to see you there!

Here are a few resources that I mentioned during our chat:

1. Turkana County Veterinary Manual

2. Community-Designed One Health Units as a Model for Integrated Service Delivery in Pastoralist Areas of Africa

3. World Pastoralist Forum

4. Network for Ecohealth and One Health (NEOH)

Chat GPT generated image based on this blog post. What do you think?

O’Gieblyn also explores consciousness under the pretext of understanding whether AI will ever develop it. I was fascinated to learn about dualism, materialism, and panpsychism and how these different philosophies have influenced the discourse around the “hard problem” of consciousness, which asks “why brain processes are accompanied by first-person experience.”

Philosophical Exploration

Materialism holds that all phenomena, including consciousness, can be explained by biological and physiological processes. Much of what we consider SCIENCE aligns with materialism, emphasizing empirical evidence and the presence of an observable truth. Of course, quantum physics, with its sticky issues like quantum superposition and wave function collapse, calls this into serious question. According to materialism, mental states arise from interactions and functions of physical entities, such as the brain. Think about MRI experiments that connect brain states with mental states. In a materialist world, neural activity is identical to conscious mental activity. It stands to reason, then, that AI could become conscious if the electrical networks are organized correctly to resemble a human brain. If the building blocks determine the mind and we put them together the same way as brains, we should get conscious machines. Do you think we can replicate human consciousness in machines? The issue with materialism is that it can’t explain consciousness because, so far, it has failed to determine why subjective experience exists.

Dualism approaches this problem by proposing a distinction between the mind and body, where “the mind is the software of the brain,” made famous by Descartes's quote, “I think, therefore I am.” As a result, the mind, or consciousness, is not a purely physical entity but has its own existence apart from the body. This raises more questions: If the brain is the body’s hardware and the mind its software, how are the two connected? How does a mental state influence a physical reaction and vice versa?

Panpsychism, which has arisen out of the ashes of materialism and dualism like a philosophical phoenix, suggests consciousness is fundamental to the natural world. As O’Gieblyn eloquently puts it, panpsychism, “resurrects the Great Chain of Being or the scala naturae of medieval Christianity, which envisions all of nature – plants, animals, humans, angels, and God himself– existing within a continuum of consciousness.” It also resurrects Animism in some ways, which defines the attributes of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena, which is a far cry from our current disconnection from the natural world.

Panpsychism underlies the most recent scientific explanation for consciousness: integrated information theory (IIT). In IIT, consciousness is “bound up with the way information is integrated in the brain.” Integration, in this case, is represented by phi, which measures the independence of different parts of a system. If a system has a non-zero value of phi, it’s conscious, and the higher phi is, the more conscious. The human brain, incidentally, is very integrated, similar to other animal brains. It follows that every piece of matter down to the atom and quark is inherently conscious, but not every inanimate or animate object has the same level of integration. In this explanation, consciousness is a fundamental property of the world. I see some similarities with dualism here, considering that the brain, with its integrated parts, is necessary to form consciousness.

Panpsychism helps to solve the hard problem of consciousness by stating that it is inherent to matter, but I’m not sure about its validity. In our current day and age, there’s something refreshing about endowing consciousness to every atom. In such a world, we might care more about other animals and plants and do something about Climate Change. On the other hand, we might not. We have no trouble doing terrible things to other humans, who we know are conscious. There’s no empirical evidence for panpsychism, and as far as I can tell, no way to test its assumptions.

To me, consciousness is inherently a biological and evolutionary phenomenon that is an output of natural selection. Given that all life on earth shares the same fundamental neural building blocks, I wouldn’t be surprised if other animals and even plants are also conscious. While this is a fundamentally materialistic viewpoint, it also may align with panpsychism, where consciousness gradually emerged through evolution over millennia as neural networks became more and more integrated - perhaps.

Positivism and Constructivism in One Health

Understanding philosophical debates is not merely an intellectual exercise; it has profound implications for addressing complex, real-world issues. This connection became clear to me when I read God Human Animal Machine and reflected on a study about the convergence of Ecohealth and One Health. The study explored the epistemology and ontology of these disciplines, which are defined as follows:

Epistemology deals with the nature of knowledge, including how we acquire knowledge and the claims we make about what constitutes knowledge.

Ontology deals with the nature of reality and our assumptions about the ‘real’ world; namely, whether a ‘real’ world exists independently of our assumptions, or whether reality is socially constructed by individuals as we interact with the world, based on our social and lived experience.

Briefly, One Health and Ecohealth are both approaches aimed at understanding the links between human, animal, and environmental health. Ecohealth is primarily interested in interactions between people, ecosystems, and the socio-ecological factors that influence them, for example, how farming practices influence soil and human health. One Health, in contrast, is more directly focused on the human-animal interface, think zoonotic disease. Do you lean more towards One Health or Ecohealth in your own work? Harrison et al. position these disciplines on a positivist-constructivist continuum, one which can fit quantitative and qualitative research more broadly.

Table 1 defines the ontology, epistemology, and methodological approaches for a range of research paradigms, including positivism, post-positivism, critical theory, participatory, and constructivism. Broadly, positivism assumes the existence of a single reality that can be observed through scientific inquiry and forms the basis of most quantitative inquiry. On the other end of the spectrum is constructivism, which proposes that multiple, socially constructed realities exist, knowledge is subjective, and findings are constructed through engaging in the research process. This approach is found in qualitative methodology. Ecohealth is on the constructivist side of the spectrum, focusing on participation, justice, and ‘knowledge to action,’ in contrast to One Health, with its medical and veterinary underpinnings and associated positivist assumptions.

Table from Harrison et al. (2019).

Referring back to the book, materialism is similar to positivism in that both rely on empirical observations to measure and understand objective reality. However, critiques of materialism, much like constructivist perspectives, emphasize the importance of subjective experiences. These critiques argue that human perceptions, interpretations, and interactions shape reality, suggesting that understanding the world requires more than just measuring objective, observable phenomena.

I have straddled this divide my entire academic career; I am an expert in constructivist approaches like participatory action research and fuzzy cognitive mapping, yet my training includes biological sciences, veterinary medicine, and public health, all of which primarily adopt a positivist approach and methods. This dual perspective reveals a paradox within One Health: Its positivist methodological foundation in the health sciences contrasts with its constructivist goal of transdisciplinarity.

The Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research emphasizes the importance of dialogue and mutual learning between scientists and communities, making science part of societal processes and problem-solving. Similarly, the OHHLEP definition of One Health stresses a transdisciplinary approach that includes communities and multiple disciplines. This constructivist vision involves scientists from different fields working with community members and other stakeholders to identify and solve problems, integrating both scientific and traditional knowledge. However, in my personal experience, strictly quantitative methodology, common to One Health, fails to take a transdisciplinary approach and can be perceived as exploitative by local communities.

This is not to say that One Health researchers are intentionally practicing exploitative science, far from it. Instead, it underscores the potential conflict between the positivist foundations of One Health and its constructivist and participatory goals, such as communication, collaboration, coordination, capacity building, and transdisciplinarity.

It’s worth asking how important this paradox is. Obviously, there are many researchers in One Health with constructivist leanings, myself included! I often joke that I’m a One Health researcher with an Ecohealth hangover. Or perhaps vice versa. There has been an ongoing discussion of these issues within the field, as exemplified by the Harrison et al. paper. However, One Health has failed to position itself on the continuum of positivism and constructivism to its detriment. Harrison et al. note, “One Health appears to be less clearly defined [than Ecohealth] at the theoretical level.” They had difficulty classifying the One Health papers by paradigm position in their review.

Each one of these paradigms is valuable; vaccines rely on biomedical research. However, we couldn’t identify barriers to vaccine delivery and develop sustainable solutions with community members without participatory research. By identifying their research more firmly on the positivist-constructivist continuum, One Health practitioners can identify their ontological and epistemological leanings and outline their aims, beliefs, and methodological approaches. This would also help fulfill the goals of One Health. For example, a biomedical researcher paired with a participatory rural appraisal expert to work on rabies eradication from both ends of the philosophical spectrum. In another example, gender equity is a foundational principle of One Health, yet it is often overlooked in One Health research. By applying a Critical Theory approach (Table 1), which encompasses gender analysis and feminist theory, we can better achieve this goal.

There have been many calls for social scientists to be involved in One Health. Positioning One Health research on this continuum can provide specific examples of where their inclusion is appropriate and necessary, for example, when a solution to a community health challenge is the aim of the research, in contrast to developing a new drug or therapy in the lab. In other words, when a constructivist approach is required. Ecohealth can benefit from One Health’s more positive leanings, for example, in using economic analysis to demonstrate its added value.

We need mixed methods in One Health that harness multiple paradigms. Harrison et al. introduce system dynamics modeling (SDM) as a convergence methodology that can bridge the positivism-constructivism gap. My own experience with fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) highlights the ability of systems-focused methodologies to accommodate a variety of paradigms in the same research activity. Participatory epidemiology, as the name suggests, is also an example of a convergence methodology. One Health researchers' unfamiliarity with systems approaches and qualitative analysis is a common hurdle in accessing these tools. I encourage you to explore Mental Modeler for systems approaches and FCM. It offers excellent resources and user-friendly, free online software. For those of you looking to expand into qualitative research, I highly recommend the free resources available from Delve. These tools can provide a solid starting point for your qualitative research journey.

Although I don't claim to be a philosophy expert, I hope this post inspires you to consider how these frameworks and paradigms can enrich your research and perspective. Reflecting on positivism and constructivism has certainly deepened my understanding of my work. I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below. How do you navigate the balance between these paradigms in your own research, and what philosophical frameworks do you find most compelling or challenging? I look forward to further conversations.

Tools and Resources

Mental Modeler (Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping): mentalmodeler.com

 The Essential Guide to Coding Qualitative Data: https://delvetool.com/guide

Sources

O'Gieblyn, M. (2022). God, human, animal, machine: Technology, metaphor, and the search for meaning. Anchor.

Harrison, S., Kivuti-Bitok, L., Macmillan, A., & Priest, P. (2019). EcoHealth and One Health: A theory-focused review in response to calls for convergence. Environment international, 132, 105058.

Lincoln, Y. S., Lynham, S. A., & Guba, E. G. (2011). 6. Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences, revisited. The Sage handbook of qualitative research, 97-128.

Degeling, C., & Rock, M. (2020). Qualitative research for one health: from methodological principles to impactful applications. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 7, 70.

OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (June 2024 version) [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com/ (Outline, editing, and image generation)

1. Foster meaningful dialogue among experts from diverse backgrounds and fields of expertise.

2. Discuss the role of livestock in the GHG balance.

3. Understand how GHG emissions are calculated across various livestock production systems.

4. Explore the impacts of climate change and the resilience of pastoral communities. 

Below, we have outlined the main themes and takeaways from the Dialogue. We hope this will be the first of many events exploring this topic and facilitating productive dialogue between stakeholders in different fields.1

Greenhouse Gas Emissions  

During the Dialogue, panelists shared unique insights on the impact of livestock on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. They highlighted that the livestock sector contributes 14.5% of total human-induced global GHG emissions, with methane being the largest contributor. For instance, 70% of emissions in the sub-Saharan Africa livestock value chain are from methane. A recent report revealed that carbon soil sequestration can’t offset emissions from livestock, although improved grazing systems can help. One panelist presented evidence that managed grazing systems are a net contributor to GHG emissions compared to wildlife-dominated systems, while another panelist contested this with a different study. The discussion also delved into the issues of overgrazing and overstocking, both of which contribute to environmental degradation, thereby exacerbating the impacts of climate change.

Mitigation Strategies  

Panelists engaged in a robust discussion on strategies to mitigate emissions. They debated various approaches, including dietary shifts, optimizing emission intensity within each type of production system, and reducing livestock numbers. At the global level, affluent countries were urged to reduce their consumption of animal products. However, in lower-income countries, the discussion was more nuanced, with Dr. Garnett noting, “A contraction and convergence approach to diets would result in an increase in animal product consumption.”

Speakers emphasized that intensifying production within pastoral systems reduces emission intensity. Examples of how to intensify production include:

1. Increase feed level

2. Decrease grass maturity

3. Decrease forage to concentrate ratio

4. Improve animal health

The Mongolian case study highlighted that inefficient markets disincentivize pastoralists' ability to reduce livestock numbers. Thus, better linking pastoralists with global markets, including marketing their unique products, can help reduce emissions. Furthermore, economic development can help decrease stocking rates and combat environmental degradation. 

Understanding how GHG emissions are calculated is key to reducing them. In Tier 1 methodology, the livestock population is multiplied by default emission factors. As a result, reducing livestock numbers reduces emissions. In contrast, Tier 2 methodology uses animal performance data, not default emission factors. This data is specific to the production system, allowing for a more nuanced comparison between GHG emissions in various systems. Tier 2 methodology is a better tool for policymakers to target the source of the highest emissions without necessarily targeting livestock numbers. 

Reducing livestock numbers was a frequently mentioned strategy to reduce GHG emissions. However, in-depth discussion between the panelists and participants highlighted the following points: 

1. Decreasing livestock numbers isn’t possible with human population growth, even if we increase production.

2. What is production to a pastoralist? Animals have social and cultural functions, not just economic. Productivity does not always apply to pastoral systems.

3. Improving the value chain can achieve the same (economic) outcome with fewer animals.

Reducing livestock numbers was also discussed as a way to combat rangeland degradation. Some panelists pushed back against this narrative, emphasizing that grazing time, in other words, livestock mobility, not stocking density, was the main contributor to rangeland degradation. Thus, policy should ensure access to pasture and support traditional mobile herding practices that limit grazing time and take advantage of sparsely distributed natural resources. Josephat emphasized that “the problem is not stocking rates, but the problem is the issue of land. The only thing that causes overgrazing is how many days these cattle are exposed to grazing in a given area and how many days the plants have time to recover.”

A New Paradigm in Livestock Development

Greenhouse gas emissions are calculated using an emissions/unit of product approach. However, this reductionist perspective does not consider the effects on biodiversity, soil, water, air pollution, and animal welfare. The prevailing approach ignores the other externalities of highly efficient livestock production systems, such as crop production required to finish animals at feedlots. Dr. Köhler-Rollefson emphasized, “We need a new paradigm for livestock development that considers biodiversity, animal welfare, and pollution.”

The benefits of pastoralist livestock need to be considered alongside the GHG emissions. For example, in India, pastoralists’ animals deposit nutrient-rich manure on farmer’s fields, providing economic and ecological benefits.

Climate Resilience and Pastoral Livelihoods

Critical to our discussion is that the livestock sector supports the livelihoods and food security of over 1.3 billion people. Climate change is having a devastating impact on the 500 million pastoralists around the world, causing the death of millions of livestock, which has significant economic and food security impacts. It threatens the traditional practices of pastoralists and their cultural heritage. 

In Karamoja, pastoralists describe climate change in terms of weather. Specifically, droughts are more common and longer, and the timing of the “normal” rains is changing. As a result, and through the compounding effects of other shocks and hazards, acute malnutrition rates are above 10% (the international nutrition emergency threshold). Climate adaptation strategies include keeping camels, using mobile phones to investigate environmental conditions, and pursuing peace.

Conclusion

The dialogue underscored a prevalent tension inherent in discussions surrounding livestock-related GHG emissions. On one hand, there's a pressing need to mitigate methane emissions, a potent GHG, to align with climate objectives. On the other hand, pastoralist communities are disproportionately bearing the brunt of climate change impacts, despite contributing minimally to its causation. Moreover, the broader ecological, social, cultural, and economic benefits of pastoralism and the externalities associated with more intensive production systems often remain overlooked in the discourse on GHG emissions. Key insights gleaned from the dialogue include:

1. Increasing productivity is needed within existing pastoral systems, but transitioning to a sedentary, intensive production system will do more harm than good.

2. Pastoralists need to be included in the conversation on GHG emissions; more research is needed on community sensitization, education, and engagement.

3. We must consider pastoralist livelihoods when discussing GHG emissions. People can’t give up their livelihoods.

4. The real issue is the massive growth of intensive livestock production and consumption in high-income countries, made possible by fossil fuels, global transport networks, and corporate marketing and advertising.

5. Pastoralists need to be included in decision-making and policy; their voices need to be heard. 

6. Emission reduction strategies need to be localized to pastoralist communities 

7. Understanding the benefits of pastoralism is critical in policy discussions

As Dr. Arasio noted, “We need to bring pastoralists themselves to the center of this discourse, and everything else will follow.”

Let’s continue the conversation. Please join the World Pastoralist Forum on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. Thanks to all our panelists and attendees. See you next time! 

Evan, Ariell, Loupa, and Wahid

World Pastoralist Forum 

Kimormor, which means ‘All Together’ in Turkana, is a government-led, NGO-supported initiative that brings health, veterinary, water, and administrative services together to remote communities. It’s a mobile, One Health approach that helps to improve access to critical services for mobile pastoralists who are constantly on the move. The reality is that a mother and her children may have to walk 50 km to reach a health clinic for immunizations. The dry season grazing areas are likely even farther, sometimes in Uganda or another country. Turkana is the 2nd largest county in Kenya. To travel in Turkana is to experience its vastness. Combined with the high temperatures and poor road infrastructure, access to health, veterinary, and other public services is limited. Kimormor is working to overcome that. During the planning process, mobile Kraals, often along the border, are targeted for the outreach. These kraals, due to constantly being on the move and found along the border or in different countries, have the most limited access to services in Turkana.

In addition to maternal and child health services, family planning, livestock vaccination, and deworming, people can also get National ID cards and birth certificates. Although it might not seem like it, IDs are one of the most essential aspects. Without an ID, you can’t sign up for the national health insurance fund, receive relief food, or access a host of government services. I heard that a 70-year-old woman got an ID card for the first time, which isn’t an uncommon story. Tree planting, especially native Acacias, is also an important part of Kimormor. Camels and goats eat the leaves, while sheep and cows eat the seed pods.

It’s hard to overstate how important livestock are in Turkana. Milk, especially, is a vital part of the diet and the most important source of nutrition for children in the dry season. Livestock also make the greatest contribution to household income. Need to buy grain from the market? Sell a goat. Need to pay for a visit to the hospital in Lodwar? Sell a goat. Animals are given as gifts or loaned out as a type of social safety net. Imagine you are a poor family that doesn’t have a goat to milk. A more prosperous family in your kraal or village will loan you a goat. You get milk and take care of the goat. The goat has a few kids, and now the original loaner gets 3 or 4 goats in return as interest on their loan. In order to get married, tens to hundreds of animals are needed for dowry. Livestock are your most important asset. They are the bank account. As someone in a recent focus group said, “If your animals are healthy, you’re healthy.” It’s worth mentioning that the reason livestock are the main source of nutrition and income is that crop agriculture isn’t possible in such an arid environment. There is some farming along the seasonal rivers, but it’s minimal in Turkana. It’s easy to ask why Turkana communities don’t settle. Their lives would be easier without migration. That question ignores the environmental conditions found in Turkana. Pastoralists are rational. Rearing livestock is the ONLY viable livelihood in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALSs), given the limited and variable rains.

Alternative sources of income can help support families, but if your goal is to replace livestock with money and crops, you might as well stick your head in the sand of the Turkwel River. I’m being facetious, but the point remains. You can’t farm when there isn’t rain. Given this importance, one of the reasons Kimormor works so well is because people know there will be veterinary services for their livestock. They will turn up and utilize the rest of the services. Livestock are the entry point for working in Turkana.

When we first arrived in Lodwar, we attended multiple County One Health Unit (COHU) meetings. The COHU is what plans and implements One Health initiatives like Kimormor, and is led by Erenius Nakadio, Robert Rotich, and Jacob Mutua, the One Health focal persons for Veterinary, Health, and Environment, respectively. Jamilla was standing in for Jacob as the Environment focal person for much of the planning of this activity. Since the team would be traveling together for 9 days, it was a great opportunity to get in the field, do some interviews and focus groups, and see what Kimormor was all about.

First, we drove to Kakuma on the tarmac, then headed west to Loreng. What first caught my attention was the bright green foliage of Prosopis juliflora that was so thick in some places our car had trouble getting through. Prosopis is an invasive species brought to East Africa ostensibly to stop desertification. What happened instead is an all-too-familiar tale of the rapid spread of an invasive species to the detriment of everyone living there. Due to its rapid growth, deep roots, and allelochemicals, Prosopis outcompetes native plants and uses up limited ground and surface water. Its pods are also toxic to livestock when eaten over a long time period, like during a drought when it’s the only available food source. We heard in our focus groups that animals’ teeth will rot and fall out from eating the pods, killing the animal. People and animals also suffer physical injuries from the thorns that can lead to nasty infections. Overall, Prosopis reduces pasture, browsing, and water availability, leading to poor livestock and human health.

For the first few days of Kimormor, we were based at a compound in Loreng with the rest of the vet team. The sleeping arrangements were interesting. Angela and I had thin, woven mats we bought in Lodwar. They were dual purpose, as a place for interviews and to sleep! Luckily, since I grew up camping, I adjusted to mat life quickly, although my hip bones and knees were a bit sore!

The only water we had for personal hygiene and handwashing was from a truck traveling with the Kimormor team. We got a bucket of water and used it to bathe in the morning. Even washing our hands before and after meals, we were limited to what we got from the truck. It was a small look at what it’s like to live in a water-scarce place. There were multiple mornings when I was waiting for the water truck so I could bathe. We were drinking bottled water, but in the 38 C (100 F) temperatures, I felt like I couldn’t get enough to drink. It’s easy to see why hygiene and handwashing are lower on the priority list when your first order of business is getting enough water to drink.

That’s why I don’t think addressing issues of hygiene and sanitation is as simple as behavioral interventions and sensitization. Water availability is a limiting factor. Drinking water is the first priority, not just for people, but also livestock. At the beginning of each focus group, I ask a simple question: What do you do during a typical day?1 Inevitably, in both the men and women focus groups, the answer revolves around water. Women go to the closest water source, either a borehole or, more commonly, shallow wells in the riverbed, to get water for domestic use and the young animals that stay near the home during the day. Men take the older animals to a watering point, ideally where there is also pasture. But the two don’t always go together. A common strategy is to water the animals every other day – one day for grazing and browsing, and the next day, they will take the livestock to a watering point that might be many kilometers away.

A common suggestion to improve water availability during focus groups has been strategic water infrastructure development, near homes and grazing areas. The government and NGOs are putting in boreholes, but it’s not a perfect solution. Many break down without anyone to work on maintenance and repair. During severe droughts, the water table gets so low that boreholes don’t work. Also, the quality of water from boreholes varies. High salinity is often an issue. Water committees at the village or Kaal level can help address issues around maintenance and repair.

After Loreng, we traveled to Makutano and Lomenguro Kraal for the next outreach. It was very exciting because the US Ambassador, Meg Whitman, came to visit the site. There was a lot of craziness, but everything went smoothly. We were in Nanam for a few days, bringing services to Ingechel Kraal before heading back to Lodwar. Hot, tired, and dusty, it was a relief to get back to Quanam Woods, my hotel, and take a shower that didn’t involve a bucket.

Our time with the Kimormor team highlighted the importance of water in Turkana and its contribution to health. Once you’ve lived in a water-scare environment, even for a short time, it becomes clear: water is life, and it’s essential for people and livestock to thrive, but poor water quality and limited availability can drive disease. In future blog posts, I’ll continue to take you through life in Turkana, exploring the contribution of livestock and human disease, access to services, drought, and conflict to health. Step by step, we will explore how the environment contributes to the health of people and animals.

I have to give a big thank you to my friend Abby, the Chief Communications Officer for Turkana County. Abby was kind enough to share her amazing photos with me. I was so busy with focus groups and key informant interviews that I didn’t get a chance to take many pictures. Asante sana, Abby!

One Health

The beauty and frustration of One Health (OH) is its breadth, and its variable meanings depending on who you ask. As a concept, OH started to gain steam in the early 2000s with a focus on zoonotic diseases, building from ‘One Medicine.’ There’s a much longer history you can read about HERE.

The focus has continued to be on zoonoses and veterinary-public health, which is great! There’s just one issue. Every definition of One Health includes the environment. According to the WHO, One Health is an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and the environment.

The One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP) states:

One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent. The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for clean water, energy and air, safe and nutritious food, taking action on climate change, and contributing to sustainable development.1

The OHHLEP definition is my favorite because it illuminates the values associated with OH.

Critically, the environment, often mentioned, is missing from OH! In my mind, the environment is THE critical component of health, not just as an upstream driver and mediator of infection, but also providing the basics for life (air, water, food), economic development and livelihoods (ecosystem services), and the foundation for meaningful relationships, etc. There are many different ways you can look at this, including the social-ecological model of health, Ecohealth (ecosystem approaches to health), and Planetary Health, the list goes on. But ultimately, if you care about health and well-being, you must consider the environment.

That got me thinking: if OH is trying to sustainably optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, we need some way to measure or assess how well it’s doing. And thus – the Community One Health Index (COHI) was born. Briefly, I define the COHI as a measurement of community health and well-being that includes human, animal, and environmental health indicators. For my PhD, I will develop, pilot, and validate the COHI in Turkana County, Kenya.

The beauty of indexes is that they make it possible to compare data that is measured in different units and scales directly. This is because indicator data is normalized. Hypothetically, if you were to measure aspects of environmental health such as soil and water quality, grass availability, biodiversity, plant health, and others, you could combine them with aspects of human and animal health, such as disease burden, access to services, and so on. I guess we’ll see if it works!

Pastoralism

A critical aspect of my research is that I work in Turkana County, in the drylands of Northern Kenya, home to Turkana pastoralists. Pastoralism is a way of life and livelihood that relies on mobility to harness variable and minimal rainfall in arid regions to produce meat, milk, and income. Pastoralists move with their livestock to find water and pasture depending on the season and local weather/climate patterns. For example, we conducted some focus groups at Ingechel kraal. The kraal was just about to move to Mogila Hill, which is one of their dry-season grazing areas. There are usually 50-150 households surrounding the ‘kraal’ or livestock enclosure. In the Turkana context, you can think of kraals as mobile social groups that migrate as a unit to find pasture for their livestock.

Due to the close relationship between grasslands, livestock, and people, pastoralists are One Health experts. By centering the research process on local communities and using participatory methods, I aim to respectfully weave Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to understand One Health in Turkana.

And now, some methods

We are combining two approaches. First, participants draw a map of their village or kraal (i.e., participatory mapping). The map includes key landmarks, including watering points, grazing areas, homes, stores, and health centers. Using the map, I then start to ask probing questions about how different aspects of the environment are linked to animal and human health. As each concept comes up, I write it on the map. For example, concepts may include water and pasture availability, conflict, drought, prosopis (an invasive tree), access to health and veterinary services, livestock and human disease, livestock milk production, nutrition, and many more! Then, using fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM), the participants indicate the relationship between each concept. In FCM, a green arrow (positive) or red arrow (negative) is drawn between concepts. In this case, positive or negative refers to correlation, not good or bad. For example, as drought increases, milk production goes down, therefore the arrow would be red. Then, participants assign a number between one and ten to each arrow to indicate the strength of the relationship – strong, medium, or weak. If drought has a large impact on milk production, it may receive an 8, 9, or 10. Using FCM, you can calculate centrality, a measurement of importance for each concept, which will be very helpful in selecting indicators.

Graduate Climate Fellowship

Finally, I want to mention that I am a Tufts CREATE Solutions Graduate Climate Fellow. The fellowship supports Tufts students working on interdisciplinary projects in the realm of climate solutions and is the reason I can complete the first phase of my PhD work. I am so grateful for this opportunity. It’s been great to meet the other fellows as well, who are working on fascinating projects of their own to combat Climate Change and improve community resilience.

Arsenal just scored - the crowd is screaming - which is my cue for bed. Kwaheri for now! Until next time, from the drylands in Turkana.

Honestly, Julius, what kind of friend would I be if I left you to pull off a miracle on your own? - Rachel Aaron (Heartstrikers Book 1)

Nairobi

After 17 hours of travel, including a mad dash through Heathrow to catch my second flight, I arrived in Nairobi last Monday at 11 pm. Even though it was dark, I was immediately struck by all of the infrastructure development since my last trip in 2018. There are a bunch of overpasses and the Expressway that are new (to me). The other big change is Uber. I didn’t use it before, but now it is so convenient to get a ride. The biggest benefit is that the app sets the price, which is much more affordable than the Mzungu price! I was able to move around Nairobi with no problems.

My first, jet-lagged, day was jam-packed with activities! I met up with Angela at the University of Nairobi. Angela is assisting me as a research assistant in the field. She just graduated from the University of Nairobi with a Master’s in Gender and Development Studies. Angela worked on the SheVax+ project that my advisor, Prof. Hellen Amuguni, leads. She is an expert in qualitative research and will be helping with data collection and analysis, including leading the women-specific focus groups. I am so excited to have Angela, and I know I will learn a lot from her. It will also be great to not have to transcribe and code every interview myself!

Angela and I met with Dr. Catherine Kaluwa, my in-country supervisor for the project. It was wonderful to meet in person, brainstorm about the interview guide, and visit the beautiful University of Nairobi Campus. Hellen and Catherine will join us in the field next month, which I’m very excited about!

I spent the afternoon at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) campus. Dr. Lian Thomas kindly hosted me. I was able to connect over lunch with multiple PhD and Master’s students who are working on various issues, including food safety, infectious disease surveillance, and zoonotic disease spillover. It was a privilege to talk with Dr. Hung Nguyen, the co-leader of the Animal and Human Health program. Dr. Nguyen is also on the board of Ecohealth International (EHI). I am an Early Career Representative for EHI and a member of the Network for Ecohealth and One Health (NEOH) - the European chapter of EHI. I know, there are too many acronyms! I was also able to talk with Dr. Shauna Richards, who is a post-doc fellow with Capacitating One Health in Eastern and Southern Africa (COHESA). Tufts and ILRI have a long and successful collaboration history, and I am very happy I got to meet people I look up to in the field. I hope it results in future opportunities to work together!

I woke up at 4:30 am to get on the flight to Lodwar in Turkana County, the Cradle of Humanity.

A Reunion to Remember - The Thorn Birds and Other Stories

In 2018, I stayed in the Africana Guest House in Lodwar, where I met Ian, who became one of my closest friends. In the subsequent years, Ian and I have stayed in touch, checking in every few months. Ian looked at a few hotels for me before I arrived, and as a thank you, I wanted to bring him something from home. He requested a book, and The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough is one of my favorites. I love sweeping, multi-generational stories (a la Ken Follett), and The Thorn Birds is one of the best examples of the genre. The crushing angst of Meggie and Ralph (no spoilers!) left an echo in my memory. And the story of what living on a spread like Drogheda fascinated me. Maybe it subconsciously influenced my passion for herding and pastoralism. Anyway, I was perusing the shelves at Barnes and Noble, coffee in hand (is there anything better?), and grabbed it for Ian.

Ian loved the book. He said how special it is that we are together after all this time - he wasn't sure if I was ever coming back! Since 2018, Ian has finished his business certificate at Turkana University College, got married, had two kids, and started his own business as a boda boda driver. My life has changed for the better too. I finished veterinary school, got married, worked in private practice, started the PhD program, and became a homeowner. Look at us now!

Lodwar Cleanup

Angela and I met with Dr. Benson Long’or (County Director for Veterinary Services) and Director Phoebe Ekal (Director for Environment) when we first arrived in Lodwar. Director Phoebe invited us to join in a cleanup activity the following day. We walked all over Lodwar and picked up trash. A garbage truck followed us around town to collect the trash and take it to the landfill. It was a party-like atmosphere! A van followed us with a loudspeaker blasting music and keeping the energy high. Although it was hard work, I was rejuvenated with multiple dance breaks. It was a meaningful experience working with a large group to clean up the environment - I’ll cherish the memory. An issue in Lodwar and many other rural areas in Kenya is proper waste disposal. We not only picked up trash, but Director Phoebe and the other environment officers were able to educate the community about waste management and the dangers of uncontrolled dumping on health. She emphasized that “a clean environment marks the beginning of a quality life” (source). The ONE HEALTH story was very clear to me when I saw goats standing on top of a waste pile, eating plastic. So not only can plastic harm people (through burning and releasing toxic fumes), but also goats and other livestock can get obstructed and have serious health issues. This example emphasizes why the environment plays such a key role in human and animal health, a focus of my PhD and something I’ll be discussing in even more detail in this blog.

The Buildup

Since we arrived, Angela and I have been attending various meetings, where I have presented my research proposal and gotten feedback from key stakeholders. We have met with the County One Health Unit (COHU) twice, who are currently deep in preparation for a Kimormor (integrated One Health service delivery) activity that starts on Saturday. We will be in the field with the whole team for ten days, traveling from Loreng to Makutano to Nanam in Turkana West and Turkana North subcounty. Apparently, the US Ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman, will visit one of the sites, so that’s pretty cool! I will write a lot more about Kimormor in my next post, and I am excited to share how this innovative and impactful initiative works to bring critical public services closer to mobile and remote communities. Angela and I will also be able to start our data collection in the field, harnessing the Kimomor mobilization. Can’t wait! That’s all for me now. I hope you have found this interesting. Please share with your friends so they can also subscribe.

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Kwaheri (goodbye) for now!

Evan

So why am I starting this blog? One thing I am very passionate about is bringing community voices to the forefront, whether it be on issues around health, climate, or sustainability. My goal is for this blog to do just that, interspersed with my own personal experiences. This will also be a place to explore my own ideas, whether that be on mainstreaming gender in One Health or how to incorporate the tenets of Ecohealth into my work.

There are many people working on One Health issues among pastoralists, including infectious diseases, access to medical and veterinary services, or adaptation to the devastating impacts of Climate Change. I hope this blog can be a place to discuss and explore these topics together and work on solutions that support pastoral livelihoods while centering the experiences and perceptions of pastoralists themselves. As I always say, pastoralists are the true One Health Experts! If you are interested in any of these topics, or maybe just want to follow my research journey, please join me and become a subscriber! I’ll be sending weekly updates from the field, WIFI permitting. Wishing you a meaningful and joyous start to your 2024.