Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [14]
William Gumbo loves his farm. He carries a hardback ledger in which he records every detail of his plants’ lives. Ask him about his banana trees and he will search through the book and tell you that he planted 310 of them on 20 April 2001, and then show you a weekly chronicle of their progress since. Everything is grown from seeds or cuttings. Nothing has been nursed on from a pot. It’s all from scratch.
He showed us a grove of eucalyptus trees—I,200 in all— that he has coaxed into being from seed. After a year and a half they are already 15 feet tall. In another year and a half they will provide excellent wood for timber and poles. The same amount of land devoted to maize would produce about 16,000 Kenyan shillings in income over three years. The eucalypts in the same period could produce as much as 200,000 shillings of income—over $2,500, a sum that most Kenyan farmers would find almost inconceivable.
The idea of the project is that CARE helps Gumbo create a model farm, then moves elsewhere. Gumbo, meanwhile, teaches what he has learned to his neighbours. Already he has helped 300 other farmers in the district.
The Lambwe Valley is not an easy place to prosper. It has long been notorious as one of the worst sites in east Africa for tse-tse fly. The fly populations have been much reduced in recent years, but they still take a good number of animals. The valley is also cruelly drought prone. As of early October, it hadn’t seen rain in over five months, so farming here will always be an uphill battle. Even if all goes well, William Gumbo will still be poor. His house has a dirt floor and it will be a very long time before he is luxuriating in shag carpets. But he will probably have enough to buy his kids school uniforms—a prerequisite for attending even state schools in Kenya—or textbooks or pencils or a birthday present.
William Gumbo, in short, is a happy man and he has a future. Surely every human being is entitled to at least that much.
Saturday, October 5
Well, that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid. We had another day in the countryside before we returned to Nairobi and flew home. We visited a tea plantation in Kericho, lunched with some jolly white farmers and toured a huge flower growing operation on the shores of Lake Naivasha, but for me the trip ended with the happy villagers at Ogongo Tir and their beloved well, and with the heroic William Gumbo.
Obviously there is only so much you can learn about a country in eight days. We didn’t have time even to visit many of CARE’s projects in Kenya, and Kenya is only a small part of what it does. But I saw enough to realize that Kenya is a terrific country that is just full of William Gumbos and Consolata Ododas (the lady, you will recall, selling oddments at Kisumu’s market) and Jillani Ngallas (the young man who longs to be a paleontologist but probably will never make it) and 30 million other people just as individual and real. I don’t suppose they can all be saintly and deserving, but they do have one thing in common with the rest of us: they are human beings. And, like us, they get only one life apiece, so naturally they tend to appreciate it—appreciate it very much, I believe—when people from a more comfortable part of the world take the trouble to help them make theirs better. For that’s what CARE does, you see. It makes lives better, in 64 countries, thousands of times every day.
I don’t know if you are fully aware of it, but in acquiring this slender volume you didn’t actually buy a book. You made a generous donation to a worthy cause and got a free book in return, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s much nobler. On behalf of CARE, thank you.
As I am sure the jacket conspicuously notes, my publishers, Transworld in Britain and Broadway Books in the United States, are also not taking a penny of profit from this—I know, I can hardly believe it myself—which means that a great many people behind the scenes worked hard for free to make this happen, and at the very busiest time of their working year. I think they deserve a special thanks,