Retired Bishop John Mahon stood on the desert airstrip and shrugged his shoulders. An aircraft carrying the President, Mrs McAleese, had just landed on another stop of her African tour to pay homage to Irish missionaries. But their era was coming to an end, he said.
"We're a spent force here," he said, wringing his hands in a gesture of resignation. "Gone. Dead." After 40 years of bringing Christianity, classrooms and medical care to the desert wastes of northern Kenya, the Irish are slowly stepping aside. In Takuma - a hot, inhospitable area larger than Ireland - missionaries' numbers are dwindling fast as death and a dearth of vocations catches up.
However, many African religious are taking their place. And for the Irish that stay, much work remains to be done in a place one writer described as "a horizontal frying pan of desolation", but which most priests and nuns simply call "home".
Bishop Mahon retired two years ago and returned to Ireland but didn't last long. "I didn't stay because I didn't know anybody. All the people of my generation have passed on. And anyway," he said, gesturing at the place where the mercury rarely dips below 35 Celsius, "it's too cold."
Under British colonial rule Turkana was a "restricted area" where independence leader Jomo Kenyatta spent several years in jail. These days the barriers have fallen but the region remains the most marginalised in Kenya. Schools, hospitals, job training and AIDS clinics are all provided by Catholic missionaries, widely regarded as the de facto regional government.
On Saturday Mrs McAleese visited a home for street children and a basket-making project in the main town, Lodwar. During her visit Bishop Patrick Harrington danced with a group of Turkana women, many with half-shaven heads and wearing necklaces of rainbow-coloured beads.
Father Robert McCabe had driven for five hours across the desert to see Mrs McAleese. The 72-year-old Carmelite lives in a remote outpost on the Ethiopian border, travelling the desert in a mobile clinic treating malaria, dysentery and a disease called hydatid, which is spread by dogs.
Life could have turned out differently for him. A champion tennis player, he participated in Wimbledon in 1948 and again as a veteran in 1972.
Later, the President travelled 130 miles south to Kitale, a town surrounded by green fields where it poured rain from the start to the end of her visit.
Bishop Maurice Crowley escorted her around St Joseph's secondary school. The President also met Father Gabriel Dolan, a civil rights campaigner. Some of the police guarding Mrs McAleese had violently suppressed a strike by municipal workers just 10 days earlier, he said.
Coming to Africa had been a "humbling experience", the President told an open-air lunch: "You are the most unegotistical people it is possible to meet."
Mrs McAleese flew laterto Nairobi, where she is due to visit slum projects and pay a courtesy call on President Daniel arap Moi before returning to Dublin on Wednesday.
One of four aircraft being used by the President's entourage was grounded yesterday morning after officials sounded a minor security alert. Pilots discovered muddy footprints inside the cabin.
Irish and Kenyan security officials grounded the plane, which was being used to transport luggage, and had a police sniffer dog sent from Nairobi, 150 miles to the south. Luggage was transferred to Nairobi by car.