Community Mental Health in the Face of Climate Change: For the Collective Well Being of a Maasai Clan in Rural Kenya

1. Community Mental Health in Relation to Climate Change

Indigenous pastoral and forest-dwelling communities often have their livelihoods and lifestyles deeply intertwined with the natural world. As a result, these communities are particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, which can rapidly alter rainfall patterns, river systems, and weather conditions. This transformation leads to issues such as flash flooding, drought, food scarcity, and increased human conflict. It is crucial, therefore, to understand the vectors of risk and vulnerability that will inevitably affect indigenous groups globally.

In June 2024 the coauthors of this note conducted a rapid assessment of the Maasai community in Ewuaso Kedong, a region recently opened up to urban influences. Our goal was to engage with various segments of the community to grasp the direct effects of climate change on their lives and to explore the intricate ways in which these changes impact their lifestyle, community identity, and collective well-being. This assessment aimed to provide insights into how the Maasai are adapting to these transformations and to identify the broader implications for their mental health and cultural continuity.?

2. Notes from the Field

One weekend in June, we set out for a visit to a Maasai clan located in Ewuaso Kedong, on the very edge of Kajiado, about 90 minutes to two hours outside of Nairobi. This part of Kenya was previously inaccessible by road, but new roads have now connected the Maasai, who once lived in relative isolation, to increasing urbanization. Visitors from Nairobi are now exploring this newly accessible region.?

Subdivisions are being built along the sides of the highway, and country homes are likely to become commercialized as Airbnbs in the future. The landscape is striking, with undulating hills and breathtaking rock formations.?

We crossed into the frontier town of Ewuaso Kedong, a dusty, ramshackle collection of buildings with dirt stretched between them. The roads have yet to be built, much less named. At major intersections, we saw Maasai men dressed in Western clothes, trousers and jackets, while still wearing their characteristic tartan blankets draped around their shoulders in various ways. These blankets continue to signify their tribal identity. The men carried their herding staff rhythmically, their tall stature and confident posture reflecting their experience herding tens and hundreds of goats, sheep, and cattle across the savannah landscape.

We met our local guide Paul Spati soon after, and under his guidance, we proceeded into the landscape, where roads gave way to dirt and rock tracks, which occasionally intersected with small rivers and the jagged remnants of a recent flash flood, which had largely washed away the metalled road.?

Nothing could have prepared us for the exuberance of our welcome. The Maasai community awaited us to stage a community feast, a large meal involving all members of that sub-clan. Maasai women seemed to spontaneously organize themselves into a single line, dancing and singing as they approached our party. Mercy and others from her team were perhaps more accustomed to this form of welcome and?

responded immediately in kind, dancing, trotting, ululating, and singing towards the women. We were invited to shake hands with each smiling woman in the line as they moved past us.?

Paul, our guide and translator, suggested that Aditya join the young warriors in a welcome dance. He gave him his traditional Maasai stick, and he tried to emulate the rhythmic bobbing and jumping up and down that the young warriors were performing for as long as he could.?

Later, our entire team was invited to partake in the food distribution. We filled our plates and moved to a shaded area with plastic chairs that had been set up for our interaction with the community elders. We enjoyed an unspiced bone broth and enjoyed Nyama Choma, a barbecue of goat or beef. Following the meal, we engaged in a discussion with the elders, sharing stories and learning more about their traditions. We then had the opportunity to connect with the women of the tribe, who also presented us with ceremonial gifts of beaded jewelry crafted by their own hands.

As our visit drew to a close, Aditya bid farewell to the young warriors of the clan, who surrounded him while swaying to a low and guttural hymn, all of them collectively bopping and humming together in slow syncopation.?

The entire community feast seemed to have unfolded with an intuitive choreography, guided by some shared and well-practiced underlying logic, which every member of the community already knew and remembered well. Participating in the feasting, gift-giving, rhythmic chanting, and dancing as the sun set over the savannah was a transformative and healing experience for us visitors. It underscored the importance of these traditional practices and highlighted how they could offer meaningful benefits to urban populations who have now lost such collective healing resources.?

3. Immediate Field Findings?

Over the course of our conversations with different members of the Maasai clan, we identified several sources of stress, distress, anxiety, and negative affect, which may contribute to mental health issues among different members of the community. These included dwindling resources, the loss of traditional livelihood options, rising aspirations to global lifestyles in tension with traditionalist value systems, and finally, layered on top of and integrated with all of these, climate change.?

First, there is a pervasive sense that their livelihoods and ways of life are under threat due to increasing population density. Kenya has a growing population and a high total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.4. Along with other tribes in the region, therefore, the Maasai have also become more numerous, the available grazing area for any sub-clan or homestead has reduced significantly in recent generations. In the past, Maasai might have aspired to possess many hundreds of heads of cattle, but now that these maasai no longer move about the landscape, and one homestead's grazing area abuts another, and there is no longer any room for such organic growth.?

There are few alternative forms of livelihood available to Maasai, despite their aspirations to modernity and prosperity. Women expressed a desire for crop farming and other agricultural activities to be practiced by the community, but initiating these activities is challenging. The Maasai community?

traditionally lacks expertise in crop farming, and the process of allocating portions of the prairie for this function remains unclear, potentially causing internal rifts.?

The Maasai women practiced a highly elegant form of beadwork and gifted us items made from this craft. One among their group expressed a desire for better markets, saying, "We do this work, it's painstaking and takes all day, but we don't feel like people appreciate it or that we receive adequate cash compensation when we try to sell it." Formalizing producer groups and linking them to markets is an unsolved problem that might alleviate the well-being of Maasai women a great deal.?

Another major challenge in the Maasai community involves their somewhat problematic gender norms. The staff, a symbol of phallic power, seems oversized for herding cattle and can and has been used to dominate women. There appears to be a broad correlation between the aspiration for more cattle and more wives per Maasai man. Status and accomplishment are demonstrated or achieved through having a large number of cattle and wives, one wife for every homestead, the more homesteads the better. Every elder we interacted with indicated that this is the path for a Maasai man to establish esteem and status. Younger women we interacted with were extremely distressed by this way of life. One young woman mentioned that her new husband, just a few years older than her, has declared his intent to seek a second wife, which is a source of strife between them. It is a difficult and delicate matter to address these foundational and fundamental elements of tribal social structure and family life. If the Maasai are to embrace their future in a proactive way, however, such discussion and dialogue within the community must begin.?

We met several young warriors in their traditional tribal regalia, wearing tartan fabrics and beadwork bandoliers, but also sporting baseball caps and hip-hop caps, carrying both the traditional Maasai herding staff and a smartphone. Soon after leaving the ceremonial grounds, we saw them change into urban clothing, get on motorcycles, and drive off to their homes. Many of these young men are being educated in schools and higher education centers, speak English fluently, and claim to be content creators with friendships and relationships outside the Maasai community. While the elders of the community may aim to have their children married off to friends, extended relatives, or esteemed individuals to fulfill their life cycle goals, the younger generation has different aspirations. There is a noticeable division between young people and elders, particularly evident in the fact that young men no longer seek to have their earlobes pierced and elongated in the traditional Maasai style. All of this signifies a tremendous cultural shift away from their elders’ norms. The question these young men are all asking individually through their choices and experiments is how can one be a modern Maasai man? How to be connected to one’s community while also engaging in the wider world meaningfully and effectively??

Additionally, there is climate-related distress. We heard stories of flash floods and dried-up rivers during droughts, seeing evidence of roads transformed into rocky riverbeds and hearing accounts of entire herds of cattle being swept away or drowned. Families who once had 200 heads of cattle now have none after three years of continuous drought, which turned the landscape brown and starved the cattle herds. The distress caused by extreme unpredictable weather patterns affects the Maasai directly and immediately, but it also complicates all the other issues confronting the community as it confronts a changing social and economic landscape, where old ways may not serve them as well any more.?

Even as we record the diverse challenges and vectors of distress experienced by the Maasai, it is important to acknowledge that the community also possesses effective co-regulatory practices which?

can empower them to meet and overcome these challenges. These resources include the communal feasting, rhythmic singing, chanting, and dancing, which signify the start and end of significant events. They also engage in collaborative crafts, sharing their creations with both community members and outsiders. These activities are valuable psychosocial resources that should be recognized and leveraged.

?4. Areas of Proposed Action Research?

In order to address climate-related distress in this community we will need first to layer and deepen our understanding of the challenges and then design and trial different kinds of intervention concepts in the mode of on-going action research. We have identified several themes above, including gender dynamics, family size and configuration, agriculture and livelihoods, land tenure and it’s rapid sale to outsiders as well as education, globalization and technology adoption that will necessarily complicate the impact of Climate related distress. These themes and the cascading and intersecting patterns of consequential impact will need to be studied on an on-going basis even as we intervene to help the Maasai in the short term.?

Through her organization Agripsychbeam, Mercy has already been providing mental health services to these communities to complement these indigenous healing methods. These services include:?

1. Individual and Group Therapy: Mercy and her team offer individual and group therapy to smallholder farmers to address mental health challenges caused by life stresses and climate change, as well as to build psychological resilience.?
2. Pre-recorded Therapy Calls: Agripsych Beam has collaborated with a local telecommunication company to send out pre-recorded therapy calls to smallholder farmers weekly. Our goal is to make affordable or free mental health services accessible to smallholder farmers, with plans to reach millions in Kenya in the coming years.
3. Training of Para Therapists: Para therapists, or community-based therapists, are the first to interact with smallholder farmers in rural areas. Mercy and her team have been training and psycho-educating community health champions to identify mental health issues for appropriate referral and management.

On the Vihara side, Aditya has been researching and documenting diverse traditional practices which have positive effects on individual and community mental health. Along with his colleague Divya Bhardwaj, moreover, he has been developing a number of lower cost strategies for community-centered mental health solutions, that may include collective ceremonies of song and dance, discussion circles, breathwork and body work, and an intentional or meditative focus upon nature. By integrating these approaches with the service delivery models already pioneered by Mercy, Vihara and AgriPsychBeam aim to build a collaborative platform that might serve not only the Maasai but also other indigenous communities adversely affected by Climate Change.?

The solutions and strategies proposed, however, would have to emerge out of continuous collaborative dialogue with different segments of the Maasai community, including women of all ages and status and its younger members, who will have different challenges and needs than the tribal elders. We hope that such open conversations about changes underway and already foreseeable will help the community align and meet those challenges together. With the right stimulus and framing, we might be able to help the?

The community considers its options better and explores new choices that were never on the table before. In working with these Maasai clans we should help them create a unified vision of their collective future that might help them navigate and adapt to modernity, globalization, technology, media, and new lifestyles, while also preserving their tribal identity.

Vihara and AgriPsychBeam aim to build a collaborative platform that brings together Design, Social Research and Mental Health Services in a new way that will not only bring benefits to the Maasai, but also to other Indigenous Tribal communities in East Africa and similar regions of the world. They look forward to active collaboration with the wider academic research, global health and social development institutions within the region and beyond.?

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