Tom Humphrieson how sport has restored a sense of community to a region torn apart by tribal divisions.
Ger Keane stands in the field with the cows. The field is made of dusty African soil and the cows are of Kenya. Ger is many, many miles from home. This place, these people, these conditions though - they all remind him of Kerry. This has been a journey of thousands of miles back to the roots.
As a young fella in Kerry Ger was unusual in that he esteemed distance runners as much as he esteemed the county footballers. Douglas Wakiihuri was a special hero of his. How could he not be? Douglas was a great story.
As a young kid Douglas raced the school bus to and from school in Lang'ata. His mother was a prison warden and his dad had died young, so the daily races were an economy rather than a whimsy, but somewhere between footfalls a dream began to ferment.
It's a long story, but when he was 18 Douglas ended up moving to Japan to train under the marathon coach Kiyoshi Nakamura. He learned the language and he learned Zen Buddhism and he became a world champion marathon runner, an Olympic silver medallist.
It is hard to imagine the courage of the kid who left from Nairobi airport at 18, departing for a culture as alien and as imposing as Japan's.
But Douglas's rivalry with the great Australian Steve Moneghetti became one of the great sporting tales of the time and, in Kerry, it caught Ger Keane's imagination.
And now Ger Keane stands in a field in Kenya and reflects on this incredible journey he has made with his friend and colleague Ger Hartmann. A few days ago at that same airport in Nairobi, Douglas Wakiihuri had been there to greet them with a smile as big as the world .
Douglas is home in Kenya again. His race is run and his legend quiet now. Under Japanese tutelage he would spend months in virtual seclusion on the South Island of New Zealand running alone on the roads and climbing Mount Cook to meditate.
He would head out on bush survival courses, living on virtually nothing, and a couple of times a year he would run for eight hours solid at a pace of eight minutes a mile. Just for the discipline.
But in Nairobi he lingered with the two Gers for a while, insistent on sharing his hospitality with his Irish brothers.
Huge smiles. Huge hugs. When they saw him Douglas was dressed immaculately in new gear but the glitter and glory is long gone. Douglas lives now just to survive. He took the two Gers to his home, a house full of love but a house full of relatives as well. A two-bedroom space lived in by Douglas, his wife, Ann, and two children of their own plus four more extended family including a blind brother-in-law.
Welcome to the home of a great world champion and Olympic silver medallist. Downstairs a bathroom, one living-room and a kitchen. And a tiny recording studio from where Douglas keeps a music career going.
Douglas fetches down his Olympic silver medal and a plaque of recognition from the IAAF for his contribution to world marathon running. Incongruous, worthless things here. William Tanui, who lived nearby, had his Olympic medal stolen in a ransack of his house.
Ger looks at the medal lying in its dusty box with its tattered ribbon. It has brought no magical powers to its owner.
Douglas has a cabinet that contains the crockery and on top, as in any house in west Kerry, sit the sporting trophies - except these are gathered from marathons in London and New York and Rome and from a world that seems not connected to this place.
Douglas says, "You must come now to Kibera," though they are virtually in Kibera anyway. Douglas lives but 20 metres away from Kibera. Africa's largest and densest slum. The scent of its poverty and the sounds of its jumbled mass of humanity have found them already.
Kibera is unusual in that it sits festering in a modern African city. If you have seen the film of John le Carre's The Constant Gardener, Kibera is the steaming slum which figures prominently. The place is in size equivalent to about two-thirds of New York's Central Park. It holds at times up to two million people.
The lack of sanitation (there are 600 toilets all told) is a massive problem, and there is a continual but seemingly futile campaign against the practice of the flying toilet, whereby a person evacuates the bowels into a plastic bag and flings it away with great force and velocity.
Douglas, who lived for two years with Ger Hartmann in the mid-1990s, leads his two friends through the slum and there is almost nothing that can be said. The air is a warm soup of germs and smells and bacteria, the people are solemn and dignified and the kids are thieves of the heart.
If you want to get out of here you had best learn to run. There is no demand for anything else that you might have to offer. In Kibera there is a gym, a tiny structure with a felt roof and dumbbells that must be 200 years old. The two Gers look at the place, dumbfounded, and ask Douglas to fetch the owner. They give him €50.
Nothing, they know, but it fends off the guilt.
Ger Keane looks at Douglas moving through this condensed, matted universe and sees his old hero in a different light entirely, a man living with his feet in different worlds.
Douglas speaks four languages and used the precepts of Zen Buddhism to make himself a better runner and the person he is. He has so much to say and to offer but here he has no audience.
He missed the big money in athletics by maybe five years and what money he made went back to Kenya in envelopes to an extended family and got spent on the bits and pieces of equipment which make his little recording studio.
Now he has to try to survive. He does so every day but no journalists ask him afterwards if the mental strength he gained through meditations was a big help in the latter stages of the day.
A race is news. A slum is a slum. In a gesture of love for his old friend, Ger Hartmann and his wife, Dianne, sponsor Douglas's two daughters, Angel and Tameka, through private school. It costs the couple €3,000 a year but perhaps education will offer the girls a more permanent escape than running gave to their dad.
Last Christmas Ger and Dianne spent time living in Douglas's house. Douglas had his brother-in-law and his wife move out so Ger and Dianne might move in for a couple of nights.
They would lie being feasted on by mosquitos, with the great sleeping slum yards away from them, and feel the honour of hospitality so warmly given in such pinched circumstances.
Back at Christmas they went with Douglas to the home of Kenyan running, up to the Rift Valley and to Eldoret and then on to Iten, which is less a town than a collection of shacks and lean-tos, a place which is the home to St Patrick's High School, the famous factory for Kenyan runners. Iten is also home to an equally remarkable institution which they were visiting: Lornah Kiplagat's High Altitude Training Camp and University of Champions.
It was a first visit. Lornah had been put in touch with Hartmann by a Dutch doctor not long before she broke the world record for the half-marathon last October. They formed a fast friendship and Hartmann had come to Kenya to see the other half of the legend of Lornah Kiplagat.
That was Christmas, when Kenya was a different place. This time when Hartmann and Keane leave Nairobi, Douglas doesn't make the journey up with his Irish friends.
In Eldoret Lornah Kiplagat and her Dutch husband, Pieter, collect the two Gers from the airport. Pieter turns to Hartmann and smiles: "You were lucky the last time." And the evidence of luck is still all around.
When Hartmann and Douglas Wakiihuri were here over Christmas and the New Year the tribal warfare sprung by the election of President Mwai Kibaki suddenly ignited.
Now Lornah and Pieter point out the absolute devastation it left. The Kalenjin are a highland dwelling tribe and the majority population here. Kibaki, who was said to have stolen the election, is a Kikuyu. Suddenly a peaceful world was divided along tribal lines. Entire villages were burned out. Shops vanished and now have been replaced by wooden shacks.
Lornah gave a quiet commentary as they travelled and the Irishmen could see the sadness in her face.
At Christmas Lornah and Pieter pulled every string imaginable to get Eldoret airport opened up and a flight out to Nairobi for some European athletes who were staying at their camp for high-altitude work. They went further for Ger, Dianne and Douglas, organising a helicopter lift back to Eldoret and a flight to Nairobi.
Douglas is Kikuyu. Had he travelled the roads of the Rift Valley he would have been unsafe. They got out just in time. Within hours the place they left behind was a war zone.
On the same day, Lucas Sang - Douglas's Olympic teammate from Seoul in 1988 - was murdered in Eldoret. Some say he was hacked to death but it seems more likely he was attacked and killed by a mob throwing stones.
Lucas was a Kalenjin and one version has it that he was mistaken for a Kikuyu. The other more likely version is that he was killed by Kikuyu neighbours. His body was then burned by his assailants.
Now months later, the two Gers spend their first night in Iten at Lornah's house a mile from the University of Champions.
There is a strange and surreal feel to the whole thing. Lornah will race in the 10,000 metres in Beijing on August 15th. Every other Olympian Hartmann has dealt with - and he has treated 53 medallists - would be in a cocoon by now.
Instead, at the University of Champions there are at the moment 14 female students about to sit and pass their equivalent of the Leaving Cert. Lornah and Pieter and the donors they can find will sponsor them through Ivy League educations in the USA. Harvard, Yale, Brown, MIT - those types of places.
In the house, as Lornah tunes the telly to catch the Stockholm Grand Prix meet so Ger Hartmann might see the progress of his Australian clients Craig Mottram and Benita Johnston (whom he has been treating in St Moritz), there are also a large group of lecturers from Ivy League schools who have been flown over to Iten to conduct induction courses for the girls.
Lornah herself, the woman who is responsible for all this, grew up on a shamba, a family farm, in the heart of Keiyo territory, a remote part of the Kalenjin homeland.
Her dad, Matii, had two wives, as was traditional. The Kiplagats moved to Keiyo in 1964 not long after Kenyan independence.
Matii owned 300 acres of land and a cheese store and he had weird ideas for his time and for the place he lived in. Lornah and her sisters weren't asked to serve their brothers. In fact Matii told them if they were found working for their brothers or cleaning up for them he would break their hands.
They weren't subjected to female circumcision - at a time when it was expected that before a female was ready for marriage she would be circumcised.
Matii Kiplagat noted stubbornly that he had a lot of land. If his daughters weren't good enough for men to marry they could stay home and have some of the land.
"I didn't have a lot of obstacles. My parents (Rebecca was her mother's name) treated us girls the same as the boys, which was very unusual. My father told me you are as good as your brothers, nobody shall bring you down. It is because of that I am doing what I am doing now. I don't know where my father got his ideas from."
Unusually for a Kenyan girl, especially one from a family of 12, Lornah finished secondary school. Then she left home and went away to do what she wanted to do, which was to be a world-class runner like her cousin Susan Sirma.
She turned down an offer to work with the coach and agent Kim McDonald and went to Germany instead. Saucony, the sports-goods company took an interest in her. Pieter Langerhorst worked for Saucony at the time. Every time he sent a pair of socks or shoes he would receive a thank-you note. He kept an eye on her progress. Lornah won the 1997 Los Angeles Marathon and spent the money building her parents a better house.
When Pieter and Lornah became romantically involved and married (she runs now for Holland as it was easier for her to become Dutch than for Pieter to become Kenyan) the conditions of girls back home came to motivate them both.
In 1998, Lornah bought an acre of land just outside Iten. She had trained there at St Patrick's. The land and what she would build on it kept her going. So she took her prize money, race by race, and poured it into a camp she designed herself. The more she earned, the more went into the camp.
The camp is run primarily by women. When Lornah is away it is managed by her sister Monica. Men - Kenyans and foreigners - train there too but on condition all chores are shared equally. The sight of Pieter cooking for Lornah used to cause a mild sensation in Iten.
Now it is appreciated that within Lornah's camp different rules apply. The two Gers sit in Iten and both confess that every now and then their minds wander back to the world they have come from. Hartmann is still primary physio to Paula Radcliffe, whose entire Olympic marathon preparation has been done on a treadmill, designed by NASA, which replicates the feeling of running on air. It cost €89,000 and is part, like Hartmann himself, of the world-class backup team trying to get Radcliffe to the Games.
Meanwhile, Kenya has placed a sticking plaster over its gaping tribal wounds. They moved many of the Kikuyus out into large camps, sometimes housing as many as 10,000 in instant new slums. The Gers passed them by on a Sunday drive with the Kiplagats. It was pouring rain and there were potholes everywhere, with the brown dust colouring the rivers made of rainwater.
For now Lornah Kiplagat's head is full of more immediate things than politics or Olympic Games.
She deals with the bustle of real life until it is training time. She is the least cossetted of the world's elite athletes.
There is a running track in Iten. The queen opened it years ago. It sits a little more than a mile from Lornah's camp. To reach it, you head down past round, mud-walled, thatched houses and down a slope. There on the edge of the Rift is a sensational vista - the dusty, pocked oval where Kenya's greatest athletes train.
Brother Colm O'Connell, the Irishman who runs St Patrick's, spent some time there lately with the two Gers. There were 200 athletes at the track while they spoke. Two hundred athletes running in the dirt.
"The place is special," says Hartmann. "It has almost a mystical feel to it. If I took world- or international-class Irish, British or Americans there they would not set foot on it. They would laugh.
"But Steven Cherono, Isaac Songok and James Koskei will train there. "Our athletes live in the comfort zone," says Hartmann. "Do a session and into the nice car, drive home, a nice shower, maybe the gym later."
He is speaking as Lornah takes time out from the day in the camp to do her own session. She is just about to run 20-times 400 metres in 70 seconds with a 30-second rest and 20-times 200 metres in 32 seconds with a 30-second rest. A five-mile warm-up before and a four-mile warm-down after.
When she arrives at the track the children run to her. Her nickname is Simba, or lion, in Swahili and the kids come up at the track. Simba, Simba, Simba. Around her the two Gers see only poverty as far as the eye can reach and aspiring athletes, elegant as gazelles, their heels kicking back up to their buttocks as they run with perfect form.
Kenya and Lornah and Pieter and Douglas have changed the views the two Irishmen have of the world. When the two Gers come through Nairobi again to head home, Douglas has a gift: his Olympic silver medal for Hartmann's sports museum in the University of Limerick.
Lornah's singlet and number from the world half-marathon record run already hang there. They are grateful for the lump of silver but it is nothing compared to what else they have received in Kibera and Iten. Thousands of miles to make the trip back home to the beginning, to community and responsibility and the exploration of possibility.
The secret selflessness of one Olympian.