My day in a matatu!

I met Francis Githaigah, Program Manager for Care of Creation, Kenya on a damp and cold morning in the centre of what was known as the White Highlands. American Southern Baptists purchased Brackenhurst from is former colonial owners, and now run it as a recreation centre for missionaries in the field and as a conference centre. Whilst I was there a large group named UN Food Unit were there – the United Nations headquarters in East Africa are just down the road from here. They also lease out office space to Care of Creation which seeks to teach Biblical principles for farming and land management.

Francis showed me the on-site tree nursery, and told how the number of different species of bird observed in the extensive grounds of this centre had increased dramatically following the removal of the dominant blue gum eucalyptus trees and replacing them with indigenous species.
He then said we were going off in a taxi for the rest of the day, the cost of which made me go pale, as I had not budgeted for that expense. However, a warm shower, a good meal and judicious use of the emergency credit card funding source later, I can now reflect back and consider the 6 hours and 160+km spent without refreshment in a beat-up matatu as probably the most ideal way to finish my African experience.

Francis, and Craig Sorley, the CoC Director, whose article in the Observer Newspaper earlier in the year had prompted me to change my itinerary in order to include Limuru, have been teaching local farmers to adopt a biblically-based approach to conservation agriculture. There is a demonstration plot at Brackenhurst to which local farmers come for training, and Francis also goes out into the local communities to help them take the brave step of changing their farming practices. We travelled down from the mist and clouds into some nearby farming areas where the principles of Farming God’s Way were beginning to be trialled. It was quite apparent that the use of mulch rather than traditional tillage methods did help retain precious moisture and produce greener plants, but as the day continued it also became apparent that the lack of consistent and sufficient rain during the months of planting and growth had caused devastation even to those farms where “Farming God’s Way” had been adopted. Some of the farmers I spoke to had repeatedly sown maize seed up to 5 times this year, and each time the anticipated rain had not materialized.

Another part of the work of CoC is to encourage people to harvest and utilize rainwater for land restoration, and we visited one farmer – quite large scale compared to some of the others we visited – where he had dug a couple of pits and channels to trap and divert the water from any flash floods that should occur from the red earth tracks. This farmer showed us his harvested beans drying out, his onions, cabbages and tomatoes, and presented me with two avocado of different variety.

A third strand of work done by CoC has been to encourage tree planting, and we visited a couple of schools where this and the other practices mentioned above have been put in place. The children I chatted to certainly knew the value of the trees they were planting – “trees bring rain” being the most basic.
Then at about 2 p.m. we headed down into the Rift Valley along the road we had travelled as a family three weeks earlier. Michael who was driving our matatu hardly looked old enough or tough enough to be running the gauntlet of heavy goods vehicles, smoke belching local trucks and police road blocks – we were waved down at one - but we got down the hill and back up gain in one bone-shaken piece.

We were visiting a farmer a few miles along the road to Narok – the very name should generate bag loads of sympathy for me from the rest of the family! On the way we picked up a lady called Catherine working for the Anglican Church in Kenya Community Support Scheme. She was an environmental scientist and came from the area very near the radio satellite dish station we had passed en route to the Mara game reserve. Catherine had been key in introducing Francis to some of the communities down in the Rift Valley, and together they were working to encourage both the nomadic Masai pastoralists (herdsmen) and the sedentary crop rearing farmers to look after their rapidly deteriorating environment.

The lovely farming couple we visited host the training sessions for other local farmers that Francis and Catherine run. It was so sad to see that they were seeking to put the three principles advocated by CoC in Farming God’s Way into practice, only to be thwarted by an almost complete lack of rain. Even so they were insistent on presenting us and our driver with a stick of sugar cane each. Their little farmstead was an oasis in a dry and barren land, and their simple conviction that this was the best way to farm was humbling. The farmer wanted to plant about 80 indigenous drought resistant trees on and around his plot, but is

really in a catch-2 situation, The cost of 40 KES per seedling is prohibitive to him, but even if funding were found, they need more rainfall than the area has seen this year, and for the past few years, in order to stand any chance of growing to a mature state from which they would help conserve

moisture and even “bring rain”. He had all the infrastructure in the form of channels and pits in place, ready to capture any water that might fall from the skies, but there had been next to none.

All in all an exhausting day, physically and emotionally, leaving me with so much to take on board and attempt to process. Francis was such a real delight to be with, and so genuinely pleased that I had taken the trouble to visit in response to that newspaper article, but what on earth am I going to do with all these impressions and insights, all these hopes and expectations, all these implicit appeals for practical support and prayer?

I am sure that if more Kenyan farmers could learn how “Farming

God’s Way”, significant improvements to the standard of life they endure would follow. But whilst they may be able to address local environmental issues, the wider impact of global climate change continues.

And on that thought, I must get down to some work on the studymodule, maybe starting even tomorrow as I spend most of the day in this Kenyan version of a Country Cottage, (complete with circular wrought iron staircase!) before hitting the road back to Nairobi in the filthy Corolla that brought me here to catch my 11.30 p.m. departure for Manchester via Dubai, and arrival at home some 24 hours later.