I asked my hosts about a little stove I had seen in a few of the Kericho homes I visited. They told me the hourglass- shaped cooker was called the Kenyan Ceramic Jiko (KCJ or Jiko for short) – invented in the 1980s to make cooking with charcoal and wood more efficient and cleaner.

But, even this inexpensive stove is too costly for many. Instead, they use a simple base made of stones and burn brushwood to cook their meals. I sometimes find little stubs of wood, blackened with carbon, in odd places around. I'm tempted to pick them up and use them to draw with, just as I did when I was a kid.

Carbon ... my old science teacher used to call it the stuff of life. And it still is. After all, there's carbon inside every living thing.

But you also might say it's the stuff of death.