Dalacha first compared movement and settlement. In the past, he lived far from permanent water and depended upon camels to transport water in bute (jugs woven from asparagus-root fiber). Children and young animals endured thirst, and livestock sometimes trekked considerable distances to water. He remembered a life in which his household depended directly and fully upon its livestock. Milk, meat, and other animal products sustained people, and during drought animals could be moved toward alol (pastures that remained lightly used because permanent water was unavailable). 

 Permanent settlement relieved one of the greatest hardships of that life. After moving to Kalacha, Dalacha said, thirst became “a thing of the past.” Water was nearby, and camels were no longer needed to carry it. And yet, he observed, Kalacha was not a good place for livestock. Animals had to be moved elsewhere for grazing, separating Dalacha and his household from the milk camels and goats upon which they once depended. “Now,” he told Wata, “I survive on what the town can offer.” 

 Dalacha believed that permanent water had also changed the surrounding grazing areas. Places that had once remained alol because they lacked water could now be settled and grazed throughout the year. “Water is everywhere,” he said, while the refuge pastures to which livestock once moved during difficult periods were disappearing. 

 Settlement also became increasingly difficult to reverse. Once people moved closer to water, food, roads, and towns, they began selling their rocho, the trained baggage camels required to transport households. Young male camels were no longer trained for that purpose. Without baggage animals, household migration increasingly required vehicles. 

 Wata then described Kulul Galgallo Dufu’s account of life at Kutur: people settled near water and roads while livestock remained farther away, with milk sometimes transported back by motorcycle. Dalacha immediately replied, “That is my view too.” 

 Dalacha connected these changes in mobility with changes in customary practices. Ceremonies such as Jilla Galani once required long-distance movement with pack camels. With fewer trained baggage camels, people increasingly traveled by vehicle or performed some rituals closer to settlements. Dalacha worried about what such changes meant for customary practice. 

 Education presented another difficulty. Dalacha understood why parents sent children to school: they hoped education would eventually provide income. But children in school were no longer available for the herding responsibilities through which younger generations had helped manage family livestock. Parents grew older while fewer children remained to herd. 

 Dalacha also observed that people increasingly valued livestock in terms of the money they could produce. Even when a household had only one goat remaining, he said, the temptation would be to sell it rather than use it to begin rebuilding a herd. Recurrent drought, declining herding labor, government policies, and aspirations for houses, vehicles, and town life all contributed to his fear that livestock keeping itself might eventually disappear. 

 He also associated changes in diet with changes in health. Dalacha believed that replacing livestock foods with purchased foods had contributed to illnesses he did not remember from the past. 

 Toward the end of the conversation, Wata asked which life Dalacha preferred. Dalacha chose the earlier life of mobile livestock husbandry, but not because he had forgotten its hardships. He had already acknowledged the enormous benefit of nearby water. What troubled him was the increasing difficulty of fulfilling customary obligations. In town his firstborn son might be absent, appropriate ritual places were more difficult to find, and sorio and other observances were harder to perform as he believed they should be. 

 Dalacha returned finally to finna, the Gabra concept of well-being. Town life had freed him from hunger and thirst, but that was not enough to make him content. “There is nothing here that will make me forget my past life,” he told Wata. “There is nothing here to make me forget my old traditions.” For Dalacha, the conclusion was direct: “Our finna [well-being] is dependent on tradition.”