Abubilla Music

The Singing Wells… Some background

Written by Jimmy

We are calling the venture between Ketebul and Abubilla, ‘The Singing Wells’ (or: ngare nyiro in Swahili, which I think is name of river bed, as it is a river in Tanzania) .  This blog provides  a little more background to why.

We went to Kenya two summers ago for a fantastic safari.  Multiple sites and wonderful guides throughout.  And beautiful pictures… But by far the most extraordinary thing we did was visit the ‘Singing Wells’, called locally Ngare Nyiro.   I’ll try to describe the scene and magic but will fail miserably:

• We arrived at 6AM to a very dry river bed in the middle of nowhere.   Our guides asked to sit along one bank and watch.   The sun had just risen, it was still cool, but very, very dry.  Not a sound.  The river bed was filled with holes about 5 feet in diameter and next to each hole was a hollowed out tree trunk, creating a small trough
• At about 615AM, a group of little boys arrived, all naked or in shorts with no shirt, with no shoes.   They carried pails, some of wood, but most were leftovers from some USA Aid programme decades ago — very old plastic or tin pails with USAid printed in faded letters.   Three jumped into one hole, three into another.  More boys came filling the holes. 
• Each hole then started to ‘sing.’  The boys inside were chanting a song – a unique song for each hole.   The lyrics weren’t too special our guides told us. Some were singing – ‘come you stupid cows’, others were singing ‘Get over here you stubborn goats’, and others were singing ‘these pails are very heavy’.   But the singing itself was beautiful.  Each a unique tune, filling the river bank with wonderful sounds as the sun rose.
• Then the first herd arrived.  From out of the bushes against the river bank a line of cattle emerged, stumbled down the bank, led by a boy far smaller than those in the ‘wells.’   The cattle walked directly to their well, where the first pails of water were arriving to the trough.  There were about 20 cattle and they organised themselves into groups of three and drank a couple pails of water and then moved10 feet away and lay down, to be replaced by 3 more cattle.  It turns out that the boys were bringing water up from a hole about 12-15 feet deep; the bottom boy handing a pail up to the middle boy, who handed to the top boy.  Two layers of planks or sticks to hold the middle and top boys up.  Pail after pail came up, with a sound track of ‘come on and drink you fat cow’ or ‘we’re sure getting wet passing these pails.’
• And then the magic.  This scene repeated itself a hundred times, with a hundred holes, filled with three boys and their pails, with their unique song, calling their unique herd to their unique well to get water.  And the river bed was transformed into three thousand beasts, 300 hundred boys, 300 songs, and probably 10,000 pails of water pulled from what seemed to us to be a dry river bank.  
• It was chaos and perfect order.   All animals were wondering about.  But each was deep in his or her routine — find the well thru the song, take your turn to have some water and then sit nearby while waiting for the others.  Dogs were everywhere, getting in the way, trying to sneak a drink.  300 songs and 3000 animals make a lot of noise.
• And then, and now it is 630AM, the first group leaves for the bush.  Animals, fat with water, lumbering up from the sand, and shuffling back up a bank and disappearing into the bush.  And by 635AM , we were alone in a river bed.  The boys had drifted away, the herds all gone.  The troughs glistened from the wet, but dried fast and that was the only evidence of what we had just seen.  Besides some cow and goat droppings which we were told would be picked up at 9 once dry for kindling.
• Our guide knew that this had gone on for 5 generations but had no reason to believe it hadn’t gone on longer — the boys were trained by their fathers who were trained by their fathers, etc.. Five generations of the same song, complaining about their stubborn goats needing to find their little well. 
• And we thought that 20 minutes beat everything we had seen.  In Kenya.  Around the world.  And that is the power of music.  And that’s why we think it is not a bad name for our little project — The Singing Wells. 

Jimmy