My son had to have a halter heart monitor for 24 hours. When he came home with it on I checked the digital readout - It was 1:53

The cruise ship Clipper Oydssey ran hard aground on rocks in the Aleutian Islands,

forcing 153 passengers and crew to transfer to other ships and spilling an undetermined amount of fuel from a ruptured tank, the Coast Guard said.

Other vessels in the area, including fishing boats and a freighter, took 122 passengers and 31 crew members off the cruise ship and took them to the port of Unalaska, about 40 miles away, Bodkin said. Unalaska is about 800 air miles west of Anchorage.

The ship had been headed west along the Aleutian chain although its destination was not immediately known.

By Konchora Guracha
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The story of Parkishon conjures up memories of a tale in The Forgotten People (Revisited) 2000 by human rights activist Cynthia Salvadori.
The people of Parkishon suffer in silence.

Water is scarce and getting it is a matter of life and death, a resource whose accessibility to it invokes traditional power relations, one that has been disrupted by officialdom.

A borehole sunk at Parkishon Primary School, by the Catholic Diocese of Marsabit, through its Development Office in Nanyuki has generated too much controversy.

The result is that pupils have to in addition to carrying their books, carry water-filled plastic jerricans.

And the rule is that every pupil carries at least 5 litres of water each day.

There was hope for them when Education minister George Saitoti and House Speaker Francis Kaparo in the company of some American friends paid a visit to the new Parkishon Primary School built by funds contributed by the two indigenous communities; Rendille and Samburu.

A modest institution, with two classrooms, it has two tin structures that serve as teachers’ quarters, while the head teacher’s house was built separately by the Food for the Hungry International (FHI), an NGO with a number of community support programmes in the district.

The school has only three teachers and an enrolment of 153 pupils - 79 boys and 74 girls.

A lot of productive time and effort is spent everyday looking for water from the hand-dug shallow wells situated within the Marsabit National Park. Local livestock and animals of the wild also water at these wells.

It is for this reason that the Catholic Diocese successfully mobilised the community to raise Sh300,000 to sink a borehole, initially estimated to cost about Sh2.5 million. The chosen site, with the approval from the district development committee is barely 100 metres off the main Marsabit-Isiolo Highway, about 1.5 km from Parkishon village and just 200 metres from the school.

As fate would have it, the Kenya Wildlife Service officials abruptly stopped the project, barely two days after work began at the site. As a matter of fact, a contingent of KWS rangers allegedly roughed up and arrested the diocesan water co-ordinator Geoffrey Gichuki, took him to a park post and locked him up.

An enraged Bishop Ambrose Ravasi pleaded with KWS personnel to release him for discussions to progress. (Gichuki, handcuffs on hand sat in the meeting).

The Parkishon community just like the Gabra herders around the Sibiloi National Park continues to bear the costs of environmental conservation.

The National Environmental Management Authority (Nema) has been sucked into the tug of war pitting the community and the local Catholic Diocese on one hand and the KWS on the other. Nema now insists that an environmental impact assessment be conducted before the project proceeds.

In his land and site approval letter dated May 28, 2003, (Ref.No. WD32/4/Vol.11/218) the then Marsabit District Commissioner S J Otieno wrote; "Please refer to your letter on the above, and note that this office has no objection to your acquiring the spaces indicated since the boreholes are for the local communities".

Interestingly, even as the project got caught up in controversies, and KWS started expressing reservations namely that the borehole construction should have been preceded by an EIA, the new DC Muthwi Katee, maintained the project should have been allowed to go on.

"As much as I appreciate KWS’s intention to carry out an Environmental Impact Study prior to the project implementation, I wish to highlight the following cardinal issues for consideration in making the final decision," Katee at one time wrote to the KWS director in Nairobi.

He goes on, "...the drilling of this borehole will be a big blessing to the community and will accord them time to concentrate on other development activities.

By permitting the drilling of the borehole, KWS will have further positively boosted its relationship with the local community, but denying them will for a long time be viewed as the organisation that denied them the opportunity to have the most precious commodity – water.

"It is worth considering that the stoppage of work at the borehole is costing the sponsor; the Catholic Diocese of Marsabit Sh6,000 per hour.

These are resources, which could be utilised to provide other services to the community in the district.

In conclusion, I still very strongly recommend that the drilling of the borehole at Parkishon be allowed to proceed," he said.

Earlier, the diocese had, through the Karare Parish priest Fr Joseph Njagi’s letter dated April 24, 2003, addressed to the Marsabit National Park Warden requested a total of 0.5 acres of land, 0.25 acres each at Parkishon and Kamboi respectively.

In its clarification of the categories of projects which must undergo an EIA, Nema, in reference to section 58 of the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act (EMCA) No 8 of 1999, clearly lists "drilling for the purpose of utilising ground water resources including geothermal energy as one of such that could proceed without such approval.

In fact, a Nema press advertisement, signed by director-general Prof Ratemo Michieka appeared in the local print media on August 11, 2003.

And in fact as things stand now, we as a diocese, the donor and interested party, prefer and indeed appeal to Nema to expeditiously undertake an EIA on this project," James Galgallo, the diocesan programme manager says.

In the interim, the villagers hope KWS gives the nod for the project to go on or Nema steps in, hands it a clean bill of health.

Till then, belligerent bulls lock horns in a boutless face-off, over a village borehole on the dark side of the hill